


New World

by Laurie



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: AU, Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fix-It, Post-Season 2, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-28
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-05-30 02:32:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15087080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laurie/pseuds/Laurie
Summary: The thing is: Lee has totally, absolutely nothing to lose anymore.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So i've waited and then I waited some more, but the utter lack of Lee/Maeve ship seems astonishing to me. Am I REALLY the only one to ship them? Well, am I? I guess we'll see...
> 
> Anyway, this is a fix-it of sorts that i wanted to see post-series 2 finale. I've been shipping this pair for the entirety of the second season, but seen nothing to back me up in this. This pic will focus solely on the Lee/Maeve relationship without diving into any of the numerous mind-blowing Westworld mysteries, as i feel completely incompetent to deal with any of those (series 2 confusing much, huh?). For any of you interested (I've yet to see if you even exist) this will be posted in three parts.
> 
> Please forgive any of the mistakes concerning the events of the series - we all did interpret those to our own desires. Enjoy this story. And DO let me know if the comments if I'm not the only one stuck with this apparently none-existent ship (and generally, what you think of this pic). Ta!

 

 

Everything hurts.

Like a heavy rusty chain following behind, the second thought slowly catches up: it hurts, therefore he must be alive.

In split second, pure panic and fear close down around his heart with an iron fist.

How could that be? This can’t be possible, he was shot – multiple times at that – he can’t have possibly survived, those wounds are not survivable.

Which means he is either in hell – unlikely, Lee has never been religious or superstitious for that matter – or…

Or he’s been brought alive in the most far-fetched sense of the word.

He is a _host_.

Heart pounding heavily in his chest, he realizes he’s yet to open his eyes. He’s never been one for bravery – never, except for that one time, that one single time, and look how that turned out – but he hardly ever felt anything like the pure mind-numbing terror he is feeling at this moment.

He opens his eyes.

Which also hurts him immediately. Unaccustomed to bright daylight, he squeezes his eyes shut, headache splitting his skull. He waits, counts to ten, then twenty, then hundred. He has to do it, he has to see, no matter how scared he is – he has to fucking know –

He tries again, and, blessedly, this time it’s almost bearable enough. There’s a bright blue sky above, tree branches swinging around, moving with eerie swooshing sound, nothing but the wind and wood creaking around him that he can hear.

He seems to be completely alone.

After what seems like a lifetime – and in reality must have been several long heartbeats – he risks a glance down his body.

There’re bloodstains going all the way down across his chest. Gingerly, he raises a hand to touch one of the bloody holes of his formerly white shirt. Underneath his fingers, below the dried blood and torn fabric, he meets new, freshly healed skin.

He can’t believe it, there’s no way they didn’t put at least a dozen bullets through him. Shocked and dazed, he runs his hands all over his chest, his ribs, his abdomen, but there are no holes he so clearly remembers they have put in him with the relentless shots of the firearms. The only evidence that the wounds have ever been there at all are the bloody remains of the shirt, feebly hanging from his shoulders, like a won over and destroyed white flag of surrendering. Relief washing over him like a bucket of cool water in a burning-hot summer day, almost painful in its intensity, he shuts his definitely-human eyes, listens to his definitely-human heart beat again and again and again.

Tentatively, slow with dizziness and pain, he tries to get up and stand, his weak legs trembling and quaking, barely able to hold his weight. Looking around with stinging eyes, he confirms what he’s already suspected – he is completely alone, exactly at the same spot where the militia has shot him and left him for dead. There is no one around.

Sharp, like a knife stab through his heart, the memory of Maeve flows to the forefront of his mind.

Maeve.

He wants to cry and scream and smash everything around him. The unbearable lack of knowledge as to what might have happened to her is almost too painful. He has no idea where she is, if she’s made it to the valley, if she’s found her daughter; for fuck’s sake, he hasn’t even a clue as to how long he’s been lying here unconscious in the woods, before someone found him and saved him.

He spares his saver a brief thought. He can’t even begin to wonder who could’ve found him here, bloody and dying, and gone through the trouble of getting the bullets out, sealing his torn skin back together. It must have been someone really fast and really close to the scene, otherwise there simply wouldn’t have been enough time for that person to act before Lee bled out and died. It had to have been someone who would actually give a fuck if Lee Sizemore lived to walk the earth again.

His thoughts quickly spiral back to the only thing that seems to matter to him anymore.

Where is Maeve?

He shoots out to run in the first direction he lays his eyes upon, and then his useless fucking pieces of shit of legs shake and he falls over, hard, face down on the ground. Furious with his helplessness, with the traitorous physiology of his recently injured body, he screams. There is nothing else on his mind but to find Maeve, nothing else that matters even a tiny bit to him, everything else completely fading to background to the steady repetition of Maeve, Maeve Maeve Maeve in his ears, louder than the sound of the galloping beating of his heart.

Please, he thinks, desperately, brokenly, please, god – or whoever the fuck else – let her be alive.

He doesn’t stop to think about how ‘alive’ wasn’t a term he’d apply to her even on his most generous of days. He doesn’t think about how he would stubbornly refer to her as an ‘it’ in the confines of his mind with malicious glee. He doesn’t think about how she would sit naked and eerily still on the wooden chair in front of him, helpless and vulnerable, defenceless before all of his petty unkind intentions. He doesn’t think about her lying there, bleeding severely in front of him, chunks of her body torn out of her, he doesn’t think about that, lest he hate himself again with the same ferocity he did the day before, Maeve bleeding out before his eyes.

He gets up again, slowly, panting hard, his breath swooshing in and out of his mouth. He stumbles forward, breath hitching, hungry for anything, any piece of information, knowledge for what has transpired while he’s been knocked out unconscious.

He doesn’t know how many eternities have passed before he finally recognizes his surroundings. Finding his way, he moves in the direction where Maeve and the gang had run off to, and he hopes against all hope that he is not too late.

He doesn’t stop to wonder what else he could possibly do for her at this point, what else he could possibly sacrifice. Gone already is his status, and his pride, and his life – he was done with it, he merely hadn’t planned for miraculously staying alive – and there’s nothing, nothing else he could offer any of them, especially someone so smart and competent and brilliant as Maeve.

Still, he stumbles forward, and he falls, and he crawls, and he hates and hates and hates himself and his cowardice and predominant self-interest that put all this in motion. Briefly, he wishes he were dead – like he sincerely planned on being – but then he’s immediately terrified with the thought. One brief heroic moment aside, he is seemingly quickly falling back into the good ol’ patterns.

Disgusted, he keeps moving.

\------

The pool of bodies spreading down the valley is the first thing he sees upon climbing the hill. What seems like the majority of the Westworld population is slumped on the ground on top of each other, limbs at unnatural angles, eyes transparent and unseeing. He nearly vomits at the sight, his heart barely getting caught in his throat.

There are the Q&A cars and the Dellos vehicles along the stretch of the valley, some parked and some starting the engines and leaving. Quickly, he hides behind a rock, the memory of his last encounter with the humankind still fresh on his mind.

Maeve, he panics quietly. Is Maeve also down there among the piles of the dead bodies?

He swallows down the panic along the bile rising up his throat, refusing to even entertain the thought of Maeve being… well, not there anymore. He can’t remember the last time anything in his life has ever been this important - as important as finding Maeve is. Finding her and then –

\- and then _what?_

He has no idea.

That’s not entirely true. He has an idea, but that’s all it’s ever going to be – an idea. For now, he just has to know she is alive and well. Scratch that, just alive is good enough for him.

His exhausted body shaking up with tremors, he sneaks a peak down the valley, just in time to see the last of the humans get into the cars and drive away, vehicles loaded full with the hosts’ bodies. He squashes down the urge to vomit again.

Once the cars are outside his view, he surges down into the dead wasteland, heart pounding in his throat, in his ears, in the tips of his fingers. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do if he finds Maeve’s body here, lifeless eyes dead and blank. The thought alone makes him want to jump under the next moving vehicle running at full speed, hero intentions be damned. He wants to cry with the apprehension.

God is he pathetic.

He keeps walking through the bodies, his heart skipping a beat every time he sees a dark curly head, only to continue its wild thumping once he makes sure it’s not her.

He walks and walks and he doesn’t find her.

His eyes tear up with fear mixed with relief, until he walks to the edge of the cliff and there’s a whole other pile of dead bodies down the bottom.

Panic renewing, he stares down the cliff, then at the bodies lying next to him, the air around him eerie and sinister and unnaturally silent.

Then he sees Hector.

Rushing to him over the bodies, Lee stumbles and falls and crawls, until he finally reaches the man. He can’t see where Hector is injured, but the horror surging up inside him prevents him from getting his hopes up.

Hector doesn’t look peaceful in his death, he looks pained and tortured. There’s an arrow sticking out of his side as Lee examines him, suddenly feeling detached, as though it is happening to someone else. He touches Hector’s face gingerly, his chest, his side.

Then Hector sputters and starts on a wild coughing fit.

Detachedness evaporating, Lee trips over on his arse, yelping and sputtering just as he imagines a character of a second-degree comedy movie would, except nothing in the current situation seems remotely funny to him.

First wave of shock passing, he crawls back to Hector, lifting his head to help him overcome his coughing. When Hector seems more or less fine to handle the weight of his own head, Lee releases him and gives him another once-over.

“Lee…” Hector rasps, voice even hunkier than usual, but impossibly _there_ and _alive_ , and it’s all Lee cares about, as a wild surge of emotion overcomes him and he tightly embraces this stubborn taciturn man, like old buddies meeting up after years of missing out on each other’s life.

Hector groans in pain, and belatedly Lee remembers about the arrow.

“Shit, fuck, blimey,” he mutters, voice coming out horse and thick. There’s wetness on his cheeks, and he furiously wipes it away. He’ll think about his being pathetic later. “Hold on, don’t try and move, mate.”

Carefully, he inspects the arrow sticking out of Hector’s side like a crooked rusty nail, forgotten among a pile of old timber. It doesn’t seem to have gotten too deep into his body, but Lee wouldn’t risk trying to get it out all the same.

“You are alive,” Hector croaks out, his eyes huge and disbelieving as he stares up at Lee’s face. He looks utterly dumbfounded, and it’s an expression Lee is sure no one ever bothered to program into Hector.

“ _You_ are alive” Lee shoots back at him, incredibly. “Reckon, we are both a bit hard to get rid of,” he says, trying his best to get his voice under some semblance of control. He smiles feebly, but Hector is as serious as ever.

“I am very glad to see you are well, my friend,” Hector says solemnly, his expression open and completely sincere. This might be the happiest anyone is to see him in a very long time, and isn’t that saying much about Lee?

“Cheers,” he mutters, suddenly uncomfortable. “I can’t take this thing out, Hector, I don’t know if you should move at all.”

“I’m fine,” Hector says predictably, as he tries to get up. Lee helps him steady himself, putting Hector’s arm around his neck. “I can barely feel it at all.”

Examining the state of him, Lee deems that okay for now. Besides the arrow decorating his side, there seems to be nothing severely wrong with Hector, so Lee finally dares to ask the only question on his mind.

“Where’s Maeve?”

And “What the fuck happened?”  


\----

It takes a surprisingly short amount of time for Hector to recount the last events he can recall, but then again, Lee has never planned for Hector to be much of a chatterbox. In about four minutes, Hector lets Lee know that:

Most of the hosts went through ‘the door’, Maeve’s daughter included.

‘The door’ closed down before Hector or Maeve had a chance to join them.

Armistice and the Japanese version of her are both dead.

So is supposedly the rest of the hosts around them.

Hector saw Maeve getting shot, but he has no idea if she survived.

Lee recounts his side of the story then. Together, they stay still for bit, the thick woolen silence stretching heavily around them.

“I’m- I’m sorry for Armistice…” Lee tries to say, awkward with too much emotion, “And for everything else- I’m, I’m just sorry, I’m so sorry,” he manages to get out.

“As much as I would like to blame someone, you are not one to fault,” Hector says somberly. “You have surprised me. At the beginning of our acquaintance I have thought you a lowlife, a pathetic loser-“

“Thanks for that…”

“A selfish parasite and a cowardly fool, you have proved me wrong on every account, you have proved yourself to be a courageous warrior, who sacrificed himself for the woman he loved.”

“The woman I love? What are you-“

“Please,” Hector says, chin up, looking Lee straight in the eye, making him want to shrink down and look anywhere else but meet this intense gaze. “Trust me, my friend, I would know a man willing to give up his life for the sake of his beloved when I see it.”

Lee huffs out a breath, frustrated at this sudden and unwelcome turn of the conversation.  

“I am indeed happy to see you alive,” Hector says again, noble in his honestly.

“Yeah,” Lee says. “You, too.”

He thinks about everything Hector has told him, but the only thing that he can take out of it right now is a sad simple fact: Maeve got shot.

Maeve got shot. For all the mystery surrounding the circumstances of dozens and dozens of hosts disappearing through ‘the door’ and everything that came after, that plain fact remains indisputable: Maeve got shot.

For all her brilliance and her capability and her profound history of outsmarting everyone she meets and getting out of the most pear-shaped situations, Lee can easily recall the moment he was breaking down in front of Maeve’s bleeding dying form as if it was yesterday – fuck, it _was_ yesterday – and he can’t quite believe Maeve would be able to come out unscathed yet again. He can’t do this to himself and he can’t poison himself with hope that seems so ungrounded now.

He blinks out the wetness from his eyes yet again – he also can’t believe a slobbering mess he’s been turned into – and when he looks at Hector, he knows the bloke can see right through him.

“We will find her,” he says with indisputable determination, chin up and chest puffing out despite a foreign object sticking out of his body. “If it’s the last thing we do – we’ll find her.”

And that’s the thing, Lee thinks, detached and resigned yet again: the thing is, he would’ve said ‘fuck you’ a little more than a week ago, and now he’s resigned to the one thing he can put his mind to – seeing Maeve’s face again. He knows there was a time he thought differently, he knows for a fact there was, but he now he can’t imagine not wanting her company at all times, not wanting that sassy smirk with a tiny shade of affection directed at him only. He can’t imagine not wanting her.

The thing is – he has absolutely _nothing_ to lose. Everything dear to him seems to be already lost.

“Yeah,” he says, “let’s do that.”

\----

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly, I’m glad to see I’m not the only one shipping these characters together. Let us hope there will be more.
> 
> Secondly, I would like to apologize for Felix’s character in this part. Please pardon my shameless use of him as an exposition device, since you will all notice how he is just spawning exposition left and right pretty much every time he opens his mouth. I have an excuse though – seeing as how this is an AU I have seen no other shortcut to letting you know what is going on, without dragging this out for longer than it needs to. How does Felix know all this stuff, you ask? Let me tell you – because lazy writing!
> 
> Why haven’t you worked harder on the plot and made it less excruciating to read, you ask? Well, because!
> 
> I hope this explanation was satisfying. Have a good read!

2.

Having Hector’s arm around his neck is surprisingly reassuring, Lee finds. It almost makes this unbearable shitty situation easier.

It’s far from easy, though. Dragging Hector along, they check each and every host body on the ground, hope dying out more and more each time they come up with no signs of life. Lee crushes the last shred of hope as they pay their last respects to Armistice, unmoving and almost grotesque on the ground. Hector is leaning heavily into him, iron-tight muscles brushing against his weary ones, and Lee is not so sure about who’s holding who here.

“They will come back here, the people” Hector says, after they spend a few minutes in silence. “We should leave before they return and find us.”

They start walking, the air of death and misery and despair left behind them. Lee has nothing more than a vague idea of which direction they’re going in order to get to the facility headquarters, and Hector isn’t much of help either. Before they really move on though, they go all the way down the cliff and check all the bodies there as well. to their mutual short-lived relief, Maeve isn’t among them either.

“So now we know for sure that they’ve taken her,” Lee comments, trying to cheer up Hector as much as himself. “They wouldn’t have bothered if she was beyond repair.”

He’s stretching it thin, pretty much straight out lying to Hector – and to himself, come to think of it. They would never leave a single host in the valley, even if it’s head were blown to bits and pieces. Each and every body down there is still intellectual property of Delos and is still worth millions of dollars, and no one in their right mind would just leave it unattended.

He doesn’t tell Hector that, especially when he notices his eyes lighting up a bit. They’ve found a bottle of rum on one of the bodies, and Lee doesn’t even feel a tiny bit ashamed for snatching it. God knows he needs it more than those poor dead bastards, so he unscrews the bottle and takes a large gulp, gagging with the taste of it.

“Easy there,” Hector says, taking the bottle from him and taking a controlled sip of his own.

“I can handle the fucking booze,” Lee grumbles, annoyed at being handled again. Hector gives him a look.

“I have no doubt about that,”

“For your information, alcoholic beverages have played a significant role in most of my narratives coming up,” Lee says, smirking weakly. “Also, seeing as how I was the one to adjust your character traits, should you ever feel like getting ridiculously pissed for no reason, you know who to blame.”

Hector gives him a weird look, but keeps moving his legs. Lee supposes it must be incredibly odd and maddening for him to listen to Lee go on and on about ‘writing his character’ like some God-like creator looking down at his handiwork. He reckons he’d be weirded out himself if there was suddenly a bloke in his life stating he was the one who wrote the part in Lee’s supposedly free existence about Lee wanking off to the neighboring girl while growing up, because it seems like a fun _character trait_ and a lovey manipulation of _narrative_.

He supposes he should maybe watch his mouth a bit more to stop accidently offending the only people left in the world who care if he lives or dies.

A brief, but oddly detailed image of Maeve kissing him rushes through his mind. _I’d much rather you lived,_ the vision-Maeve tells him, her fingers sensually tracing the lines of his lips. She looks up at him with as much affection, as, he suspects, he nowadays looks at her with. _I’ve yet to have my fun with you, darling._

He blinks, and the vision evaporates, Maeve’s distant voice still echoing in his ears.

Fuck, maybe Lee does, indeed, need to stop drinking. Makes him think the stupidest shit.

_Stop it._

“Hey, what happened to Felix and Sylvester?” He wonders to change the topic. “I never asked!”

“I don’t know,” Hector says, frowning, his voice forced and pained. “I was shot before I could see.”

“Okay, so, then, that probably means they’re alive as well,” Lee counters.

“They might be, yes,” Hector says, and then falls silent as they keep slowly but surely making their way back to the headquarters.

About half an hour later though, Lee is sensing that he is the one doing all of the walking for both of them, Hector’s feet dragging behind them, almost lifeless.

Fear squeezes his throat.

“Hector? Hector, come on, look at me!”

Hector doesn’t reply, his head bobbling around lifelessly like a doll with its strings cut out. Lee lowers him back on the ground, Hector’s body a heavy weight.

“Fuck, _fuck!_ ” he swears, panicked and annoyed all at once. Why the fuck would Hector tell him nothing if he was feeling this bad, damn him all to hell. What kind of stupid, self-sacrificing and uncalled-for macho shit is this?

But on the outskirts of his panicked mind, a quick realization hits him that he was the one who made Hector this way. He was the one who’d put all this stupid, self-sacrificing and uncalled-for macho shit in his brain and made him believe it was his own chosen persona. He was the one hell-bend on making his own Mary fucking Sue version of himself and dragging Hector’s character into it, together with all of his past hurts and grudges in the face of the dead Isabella character he had so pettily killed off.

Virginia must be having the time of her life, without him there to ruin it with all the _instability._

_Stop it._

Jesus, could he be more of an obnoxious twat? Or any more pathetic for that matter?

Lee carefully sits Hector’s body up against a tree and drags his own meager water supply out of a leather pouch he’s still carrying, bringing up a generous amount to Hector’s lips. He grips his chin, opens his jaw a little, tips the tiny bottle and hopes for the best. Hector chokes, coughing weakly, then stronger, lax face betraying no hint of reaction to the pain he must be in. Lee swears, then tries again, but this time switching water with some of the rum they’d shared, careful now, tipping just the right amount past the bloodied lips and massaging Hector’s throat with his other hand. Hector swallows. Lee sighs heavily in relief, feels a huge swell of triumph. He diligently eases the rest of the water down Hector’s throat, saving the rum, should he require it later for anything more serious. A red alert goes on in his mind, telling him they are now completely out of water.

He ignores it. There is always more water, but there’s only one Hector.

Hector’s eyes open and he squints at Lee’s face.

“What a lovely fucking way to tell me you’ve been feeling a tad under the weather! I believe you could have given me a hind a bit subtler than dropping dead in the middle of a forest, with a sharp fucking object still sticking out your body!” Lee lashes out, unable to help himself. He’s furious – he can’t believe Hector would act so stupidly and recklessly.

He can’t believe he’s almost been left alone again.

“I’m fine,” Hector tries, but his disastrous attempt at reassurance is not fooling anyone. If he were an actor in a movie, Lee thinks, people would have gotten up and left the movie theater seeing a performance like this.

“Sure you are, buddy,” Lee says, darkly. “Just for future reference, though: when something bad happens – _you tell me!_ You can yell, you can punch me, do whatever you damn please, but let me fucking know! Don’t try the silent brooding macho bollocks again, you hear me?”

Hector has the sense to look guilty at that. Lee sighs and takes in their surroundings.

Now that the adrenaline has died down a bit, he is completely lost as to what to do. They are in the middle of the forest, trees tall and thick around them, and there’s nothing to see or hear besides the sinister owl noises and trees scratching against one another under the impact of the wind. Lee has been prepared to walk for quite a bit, but is he able of dragging the weight of a grown man on his shoulders? He wasn’t capable of that on his best days – he’s never been the strong and manly type, he’s afraid – and especially not now when he feels weak as a kitten, his shaky legs barely holding the weight of his own body. And now it’s getting dark, too, and it doesn’t take a genius to realize they better be anywhere but here when the nighttime comes.

Hector must pick up on his despairing expression.                                                       

“You should go,” he says, quietly, pain visible in his features.

Lee is not going to listen to that.

“Hector –“

“You should go,” Hector says again, more forcibly this time. Lee feels tremors going up and down his body, annoyed and scared, desperation building up in a ball of nervous energy in his chest. “You can’t possibly carry me all the way to the headquarters. I’m a dead weight-“

“Now listen –“

“No, _you_ listen,” Hector says, sharp, like a bullet fired. “You’ve already sacrificed your life once, let me do the honorable thing and return the favour.”

Lee supposes he has no one else to blame, having written all that silly ‘honorable’ nonsense into Hector’s character himself. Hearing him say it in this context, the utter lack of sense in this dialogue makes him wonder how the fuck he managed to get his job, indeed.

But with his heart starting a thumping fit to bust his ribcage, Lee almost considers actually leaving Hector here, alone in the middle of this forest, his body serving as food for the fucking robot animals.

He imagines Maeve’s delighted face when she finds her, only for her brilliant expression to fall as soon as she realizes that _he is it_. There’s no one else coming out, it’s _just him – hey Maeve, it’s me, the guy who’s only tried to rat you out every chance he got, oh and by the way, I also left your boyfriend for dead, so are you happy to see me or what?_ – the pathetic joke of a man, in such a hurry to get back to her that somewhere down the line he’s left behind the only person _she_ would actually want to see.

He is a fucking disgrace. He is a stupid cowardly piece of shit, who not even two weeks ago would have already been gone as far as his legs would’ve carried him, but if he still is for all intents and purposes a stupid and hopeless piece of shit, maybe – just maybe – not quite so cowardly anymore after all.

“Fuck you. I’m not going anywhere without you, _period_ ,” he says, with as much finality as he can manage to put into those words, and he risks a glance at Hector’s face, whose stoic expression crumbles like pieces of old plaster from a battered wall.

“My friend -” he starts on what undoubtedly would’ve been a great and noble speech – and likely written by Lee himself for that matter – but Lee wraps a hand around his mouth, effectively shutting him up. Tiny hairs on the back of his neck standing with horror, throat closing dry and organs jumping and trembling inside his body like during an especially bad hangover, he stares hard into the darkness of the forest behind Hector’s slumped body.

There’s someone watching them from behind the trees.

\-----

Maeve opens her eyes.

She might as well have kept them shut for all the use it does her. Everything’s blurry and far away, and she realizes someone’s speaking to her from what seems like underwater.

Or maybe she is the one underwater. She couldn’t tell.

“-ve? Maeve? Do you hear me?”

Gathering all of her strength on this one task, she focuses her vision on the person calling her name, the voice vaguely familiar, and as soon as she catches up on the sight of her surrounding, she feels a deja-vu so surreal she distantly wonders if she’s dreaming.

She is back in the lab, same room around her, same surgical tools lined up on the desk, and most importantly – same people in the white-red uniforms staring down at her.

When is she? Is that what death feels like? Is she malfunctioning again? How did she end up here?

“Maeve? Maeve, are you with me?”

“Felix?” she tries to say, but what comes out of her mouth sounds more like the crackling of rusty metal. She coughs weakly, tries again: “Felix.”

She manages to sound like a human this time, and she sees genuine relief wash over Felix’s face, his shoulders slumping like a huge weight has been lifted off his shoulders. With a corner of her eye, she sees Sylvester standing at her other side, his eyes shut, face turned upwards to the ceiling. In a barely-there whisper, his lips form: “Oh _, thank fuck_!”

Then she is being manhandled and squeezed, her body seemingly shrinking on itself, and before her brain catches up with what’s going on, Maeve realizes she is being pushed into crushingly tight embrace.

This is so highly unprecedented she is shocked out of her mind. Then, just as surprisingly, she feels a surge of affection for Felix so strong she wraps her arms around him with just as much force. Distantly, she feels yet another hand awkwardly patting her shoulder, and she notices a torn, conflicted expression on Sylvester’s face.

“Oh god, I can’t believe you’re fine,” Felix mutters into her hair. Gently she dismantles herself from his embrace. “You _are_ fine, aren’t you?”

This makes her pause. She’s not in pain, she doesn’t think she’s injured anywhere else, there’s only a slight lingering confusion to her state, that she believes will pass soon enough.

“I… I think so.”

“What is the last thing you remember?” Sylvester asks her, and the question drives out each and every thought from her mind.

Relentlessly, cruelly, it all comes back to her, as though a giant sledgehammer smashing down every single tiny scramble of purpose and hope she had left in her.

Her daughter – her little Rosie – was trying to get through the door together with the new substitute of her mother, and then the bloody army of aggressive hosts attacked them, and Maeve, well, Maeve –

Maeve will _never_ see her again.

“Rosie...” she rasps, her grief stronger than anything she has ever felt. She can’t see anything suddenly, until she realizes her eyes have snapped shut at some point. There is a loud ringing in her ears. Nothing matters anymore and nothing ever will again. She cannot deal with it. This pain is not survivable.

“Rosie? Who’s that now?” She hears Sylvester wonder, distantly.

“Her daughter, you _moron_!” Felix is hissing, and then he’s saying something else, but her brain supplies her with the image of her dead child, conjured up by her rich imagination. Provided she’s never actually _seen_ Rosie die with her own eyes, the imagined scenes going on before her eyes are undoubtedly more gruesome and violent than whatever could have happened in the real life.

This pain is not survivable.

“Maeve, do you hear me?” Felix is saying again, snapping his fingers in front of her face. It’s not easy to focus on him, nothing will ever be easy again, and the force of her grief makes it feel like a near out-of-body experience – her soul, torn up and alone, wandering through the remains of the empty cruel galaxy, the stars whispering the secrets of the universe into her weary ears.

“Maeve! Your daughter made it through the door!” Felix all but screams, and _that_ finally makes her focus on him again.

“What did you say?” Painfully hopeful, she stares into his face, her brain suddenly working at its full inhuman speed and capacity, looking for the tinniest of tells that he could be lying to her. She doesn’t find any. Her heart plummets in her chest.

“She and her new- well, her _other_ mom were just the last ones to make it through,” Felix says. “Apparently, this ‘door’ closed off after them.”

She stills, her mind going over and over this information. Rosie is not dead. She is not dead, not dead, not dead not dead not dead

Maeve will still never see her again.

This time, though, the thought is not nearly as painful.

She can live with that, Maeve realizes. She can live with that, as long as she knows it wasn’t all for nothing. As long as she knows her daughter is well and happy and _alive_. She has certainly wished it was her taking care of Rosie and not the woman her daughter refers to as her mother, but Maeve will take it. She will take it, if Rosie gets to be truly safe and live the life she wants and be whoever the fuck the wishes.

“So, um,” Sylvester starts, looking at her as one would look at a wild unstable animal that might attack someone at the slightest disturbance. “What else do you remember?”

“Where is Hector? Is he alright?” she says, apprehensive.

There’s a disturbing itch at the back of her mind, as if she is forgetting something important. She ignores it for now.

They glance at each other in a way that immediately reveals the answer to her. Still, she pushes on.

“ _Well?_ ”

The itch at the back of her mind gets more unbearable. Distractedly, she tries to think what it might be that her brain is screaming at her to pay attention to.

“I’m so sorry, Maeve,” Felix says softly, placating. “Hector got shot and, I, um, I don’t think he made it.”

A new current of pain shoots through her body, fresh and as damning as ever. Hector – her fiercely loyal lover, and she is never going to see him again, either.

“After Sizemore held them down –“ Felix start saying, but

But Maeve’s heart freezes.

This is the itch she’s been trying to scratch.

Lee.

Lee is dead.

This time, the pain and grief of it are physical enough to make her double up. Distantly, she realizes she is far more torn up about Lee than she should be about Hector, but she is too exhausted to care or even be surprised. Lee was the one to give his life up for her purpose, and even though Hector has done it and was ready to do it again time and again, Lee’s one sacrifice somehow still feels all the more precious.

Having never been much for crying, the pained wail shocks her coming out of her mouth, out of what seems like the very depth of her being. She should have learned by now that nothing – good or even bad – ever lasts, especially with such a feeble, fragile species as humans, and as soon as she feels joyful and even remotely happy, she should know it means something majorly fucked up is about to come crushing down on her.

Her tortured mind conjures images of Lee, the Lee she suspects she was the only one to ever get to see – a soft and gentle Lee, who smiled down at her crookedly, full of shy affection, like he himself was surprised to find himself feeling that way. Lee, who for all his running mouth and false bravado, was astonished every time she would complement anything about him, as if the idea of anyone genuinely liking him has long since stopped even occurring to him. A sarcastic and witty Lee whom she could actually picture as the Head of Narrative in this giant conglomerate of a place, who would tell his stories with subtle humour and just enough irony to make them captivating; who knew about her more than she ever imagined she did herself sometimes; Lee, who was the one to see her as someone equal to himself, as someone who has almost outgrown his own personality, as someone he would admire and follow and deem worthy of giving his life for.

She’s learned to believe that people, were simple, primitive creatures, often far inferior to the likes of her and many of her acquaintances. She’s grown to think of them as dull and close-minded and impossibly _predictable_.

Lee has turned out to be anything but. He’s turned out to be someone she could feel most comfortable around, most herself.

Human life is short and painful and flickers out without much fanfare, and Maeve has learned that the hard way.

Lee is dead now, and she wants to crawl out of her skin with the torturous maddening knowledge of that.

“Hey, hey, hey, Maeve, please,” Felix begs her, as Sylvester stares around, paranoid someone could hear her pained screams. Maeve doesn’t give a fuck.

“I’m really sorry,” Felix whispers sympathetically. His hand goes through her hair, patting it gently. “Maybe… maybe they haven’t damaged his core. Maybe he’s backed up somewhere else, so there’s a chance we could restore him.”

Dizzy with grief, she slowly realizes he’s talking about Hector. He thinks she is mourning her lost lover. He thinks it is the news of Hector’s death that’s made her feel like this, like her very essence is being ripped out of her body.

It should’ve been this way, she thinks, detached and cold. She _should_ have felt this about Hector, she expected herself to.

But while Hector’s death is by all means devastating, Lee Sizemore’s death seems like _the end of the fucking world_ to her.

There must be something severely wrong with her.

“Can I see the body?” She asks them. She knows Felix would assume she’s asking for Hector, but there’s nothing for her left to care about in the world other than seeing her friends one last time, saying her goodbyes.

“Um, they’ve been collecting the bodies and moving them from the valley,” Felix says. “But it’s gonna be a while before they get everyone back here, and even longer before they can identify Hector, I’m afraid.”

Maeve takes a deep breath, exhales. She needs to get herself under control.

“What about Lee?”

“Oh, um,” Felix stutters, looking at Sylvester for some aid. The other man shrugs. “I, uh, I actually have no idea…”

“ _What?_ ” Maeve demands, sharply, eyes narrowing. It’s almost comical how they take an identical step back from her immediately, arms raised slightly. She would laugh if she didn’t want to break down and whimper.

“Well, Sizemore was not a high priority by any means – or a popular guy, for that matter – so Delos wouldn’t waste their precious time on him while they have an entire soccer field worth of damaged intellectual property to collect and salvage what they can of it,” Sylvester rushes to explain.

“You, on the other hand, are high priority, indeed,” Felix adds quickly, before she has a chance to verbally attack them again. “As soon as they picked us up in the valley, they’ve searched for you first thing, you know – probably a lot to do with those commanding powers you have that they’re quite interested in – and we’ve been immediately tasked with backing up your code and repairing your body. And so here we are.”

She mulls it over. It does make sense, what they are saying. Still, it does not do much to soothe the throbbing pain of her heart at the thought of Lee’s body still lying there in the forest, bloody and forgotten, collecting dust and grime and filth, while no one really gives a fuck about him dying in the first place. She wants to scream with the sheer unfairness of that, but screaming is not going to help anything.

“So what are _we_ going to do about that, darling?” She says, her insinuation about as subtle as a freight train.

“What _can_ we do about that?” Sylvester demands, incredible, hands flying up. She pierces him with a look.

“Do not forget it is Lee Sizemore you owe for being here at all right now, still peachy and breathing, while he’s rotting away in the middle of fuck knows where,” she says coldly, distantly pleased with her voice seemingly completely back under her control.

There are too many images of Lee floating around her mind, though, so she gathers them all, tenderly, carefully – with a mental promise to examine them all later in painstaking detail – and tucks Lee into the darkest furthest corner of her mind, puts him in a heavy wooden box of forgotten dreams and hopeless desires and hides the box away from the forefront of her mind.

She can’t keep doing this to herself.

“I am going to find him and bring him back,” she tells them, finally standing up, only now to realize she is yet again completely naked. What an irritating inconvenience.

“What?!” Sylvester rounds on her, incredulous, eyes wide. Felix looks sad, but completely unsurprised. “After all the time we spend putting you back together, being worried _sick_ if you’ll make it or not, you’re just gonna run off two minutes later, zero fucks given?!”

“Aw, it’s truly nice to know that you care, darling,” Maeve says, forcibly coy. In all honesty though, she almost cannot believe the changes Sylvester’s gone through in such a short period of time. She cannot deny that he seems genuinely worried about her, and to think what an impossible self-serving twat he used to be only a couple of weeks ago… So she is not lying at all, when she says, forcibly relaxing her posture to appear less menacing: “I am really grateful for what you two fine gentlemen have done for me, I truly am. I might have been dead, or even – I would most certainly _stay_ dead, if it wasn’t for you two. Thank you. I will never forget that.”

She slowly approaches Felix and gives him a warm kiss on the cheek and then does the same to Sylvester, both of them staring at her shell-shocked and still, their fingers touching the spots on their cheeks where her lips have been.

“I wish you would find some sense and incentive to get out of this hellish place and live proper lives somewhere far, far away from here. At least, that’s what I would want if I were in your shoes,” she says. “But I want to make right by Lee. And I want to find Hector. And there is nothing good awaiting me should I stay here, we all know that.”

They stare at her some more, still and intense. Then Felix is moving, rummaging through the cupboards, and after a bit he turns back to her, fabric in his hands.

“Some clothes for you,” he explains, and Maeve is delighted as she finally gets to cover up her nudity. Not that she is by any means modest or shy – she’s been a madam for too long to even consider holding on to traits so useless for business – but it will definitely do her no good walking around the facility naked as the day she was born.

( _Made_ , really, but she is not about to get into semantics.)

“Thank you,” she says, putting on a rather comfortable pair of black pants and a worn grey sweatshirt that’s about three sizes too big for her. It’s cover with blood and stains of mysterious origins and doesn’t smell fresh at all. She doesn’t care one bit.

Then she straightens up, takes one good long look at them. This will most likely be the last time she will ever see either of them again. She doesn’t want to get into how sad this realization makes her. This is their goodbye.

“This is mental, absolutely _fucking_ mental, you realize that, right?” Sylvester says, resigned. “There are Delos people searching the entire premises – _all_ of the parks – for any hosts left, it’s a fucking funeral is what it is!”

Maeve knows that. The thing is – with her daughter gone to never return again, Maeve is struggling to find a purpose for her existence. It’s always been something grand and obvious enough – keeping her girls safe, back when she was working at Mariposa, then – uncovering the deep dark mystery surrounding the farce that her life had turned out to be, and after that – finding Rosie and simply surviving. Now, though, with all of that permanently out of the picture, she wonders what else there is left for her in a world so hostile that the first human she is to meet is likely to try and kill her; in a place so bleak and deceitful, the only human she’s ever felt she could let go with was rotting in a fake meadow of a fake forest of a fake, fake world.

She doesn’t voice any of these thoughts to them. Felix looks sad and Sylvester – angry and resigned, so she curtly nods and turns on her heel to walk out for what she hopes will be the last time.

“Wait, wait, Maeve, wait,” Felix suddenly yells and then he is by her side yet again, three large steps across the room. She looks up at him incredibly. “I’m going with you.”

She stares at him, shocked and more than a little touched. He does not have to do that, he has done more than enough for her, has risked more than she could ever ask of him.

Sylvester lets out a nearly inhuman growl.

“Fuck me!” he groans, voice low and even more resigned. To his credit, he does not look surprised at Felix’s decision one bit. “How the fuck is this my life now, fucking robot apocalypse and everyone being out for my ass!”

“ _Your_ arse?” Maeve repeats, pointedly, still quite unable to belive the events laying out in front of her.

“Yeah, my ass gets on the line whenever it’s close enough to yours!” Sylvester grumbles, taking his red apron off and tossing it aside. It lands on the floor in a sad heap of bloody fabric. “Jesus fuck, to think I’m about to do something that stupid, when no one is even _forcing_ me to…”

Felix huffs next to her and together they watch Sylvester whine and snarl and complain as he takes off his butcher’s attire. Maeve doesn’t say it, but perhaps, the humans are not so predictable after all. They sure do manage to surprise her more than she cares to admit.

Perhaps this world might be not quite so bleak and dark and empty.

Perhaps there is more to her life than simply surviving.

A memory of Lee’s smirking face flashes before her eyes, but before the flood of unwanted emotion can overwhelm her again, she pushes Lee deeper into the box.

She’ll deal with that later, when she comes to terms with Lee and Hector and Armistice being gone. When the impact of that loss truly hits her in the gut, and she will be left _no choice_ but to deal with it.

For now, she has a new purpose, and with her history, this one might just be the simplest one so far.

“Let’s not procrastinate, gentlemen,” she says, and, carefully and quietly, the three of them sneak out of the lab.

\-----

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wouldn't want to sink down to begging, but here goes - please please please, let me know what you think. An I dragging this out too much? I know I've promised you a lot of Lee/Maeve, but it's gonna take a tab more until they actually reunite... I have most of this story finished - mind you, it's turned into a beast of a fanfic, and to think I was going for a shortish one shot, ha - but i'm open to criticism, should you absolutely hate this story like i sometimes do.  
> Fun times.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't pinpoint the exactly moment it happened, but this story has managed to turn into a bloody novel somewhere down the line. For those of you who, like me, expected a light short one-shot, get ready to be overloaded with angst, drama, and the FEELS.  
> Have a pleasant read and don't forget to let me know what you think.  
> There's gaining to be one more part to this (for real, this time, just one.more.part, I swear).

3.

_“So,” Maeve says conversationally, as they walk the tunnels leading them further and further away from the self-plagiarized, Japanese Mariposa version of Lee’s making. “When did you learn Japanese?”_

_Lee gives her a sideways glance. Yet again, she notices the barely-there expression of surprise showing on his face every time she starts a conversation that indicates her curiosity about him._

_“Back at Cambridge, actually,” he says and now there’s a definite delight in his tone at having a chance to talk about himself. The gleeful yet overly-casual way he says ‘Cambridge’ doesn’t escape her. She barely restrains from rolling her eyes as he positively glows with smugness._

_“Oh, so you_ are _bright enough to finish a degree,” she plays along, though making sure she sounds overly surprised. This is the part Lee is obviously used to impress people with, his high-profile educational background playing into it nicely._

_“Oi, you don’t have to sound so shocked, now!” He says, his lips doing that thing where they ever so slightly curve downwards, while still maintaining a grin. “I might not have a million languages and the general intelligence of a small country programmed into me, but that doesn’t mean I’m an utter pillock.”_

_When she glances at his face, there is this odd expression there that makes her pause. She’s well aware she’s been programmed to read people upon a mere glance, and she’s prided herself for doing a grand job of that so far, especially with a simpleton like Lee Sizemore. From the beginning, she’s found him to be a cowardly, selfish, obnoxious tosser, then was proved correct on every point of her evaluation, and then never bothered to read into him again until he tried to abuse Hector for abandoning his supposed love for Isabella. Back then she learned Lee was also a hurt, heartbroken romantic, who_ _invested_ _too much_ _significance_ _into love_ _._

_All of a sudden, she realizes now just how severely fucked up he is, how messed up his self-esteem_ _seems to be, and she berates herself for not seeing it sooner._

_Lee Sizemore managed to get himself a job in the most technologically advanced and sophisticated place in the world, where the characters are given backstories so elaborate and detailed – no guest would ever be able to doubt their fidelity. Lee Sizemore got himself a job that required to make sure the people coming in would be so captivated by the narratives and the spontaneity of the dialogue that they would completely immerse themselves into the experience. Lee Sizemore had to be at least smart enough and complex enough to get all of that running and working to perfection._

_Yet, as she looks at him now – there’s the self-deprecation of a man, comparing his intelligence to the ones of the artificial beings’ with code capable of storing decades worth of data and with bodies designed to seduce the even the most powerful and entitled people on the planet with a carefully placed glance in their direction. Only now does she think about the implication of him creating Hector into this idealized version of what he wishes he was himself, of how noble and brave and handsome Hector is made to be, how everyone he meets is instantaneously charmed by him. She wonders – for all his bravado and put-on obnoxiousness, for all the persona Lee Sizemore has created and carefully maintained –  just how little Lee must truly think of himself._

_“Well, we can’t all have the fortune to be an artificially designed semblance of a human being, now, can we, darling?” She says, trying for light-heartedness but coming out coldly sharp instead. Lee shrinks down on himself, the gesture only visible if one squints hard enough._

_Maeve sighs._

_“And what did you study at Cambridge?” She says, changing the subject._

_Lee inspects her with a frown, apparently suspicious she let him off the hook so easily._

_“Um, it was actually medieval history, at first. Then I got a second degree in journalism as well,” he says, his tone morphing into an obvious question at the end, as though seeking her approval for his answer. Again, she spends a moment wondering how on earth she could have read him so wrong._

_“Medieval history,” she repeats, thoughtfully, imagining a younger version of Lee, nerdy enough to go to Cambridge to study such an unorthodox subject at this age of technology. Although, she supposes it makes more sense now, what with the dark themes of violence, honor and twisted romance Lee’s narratives tend to play on._

_“Yeah, I know,” Lee says, shaking his head with a small self-deprecating smile on his face yet again. Maeve kind of wants to erase it and never see it again on his face._

_She backtracks on that thought, then pushes it away from her mind before she has a chance to examine it any further._

_“I’ve always loved history, though, more than anything. Well, maybe except for writing,” Lee is saying. Maeve looks at him, finding herself genuinely interested again, but unlike the time she was needling him for his love life history – now she can actually admit it to herself: she is interested to get to know Lee a bit more, nothing extraordinary about that. “But yeah, Middle Ages is my favorite historical period. I was actually promised I’d get to work on my Renaissance World ideas when I first got this job, believe it or not, but then I rather quickly realized just what a giant pile of bollocks their promises of ‘creative freedom’ truly was.”_

_“So there was supposed to be a Renaissance Park?” Maeve says, surprised._

_“Oh yes. Actually, there were supposed to be a whole lot more, pretty much every distinct historical era was to be recreated here in painstaking detail and get an entire park dedicated to it, at least that’s what I was promised,” Lee replies, face carefully imassive. “Ford shut down all of these projects before they had a chance to develop, though, shame that; said we had to focus on the parks already running. At least I got the chance to work on Shogun World, put my Japanese skills to practice, wasn’t really planning on that when I first got the job.”_

_It seems a little strange to her now, imagining Lee as an actual employee, nose buried in historical books and artefacts, overly enthusiastic about creating this parody of an era, probably stuck in his own little imaginary world as well. She waves the image away._

_“And how_ did _you get this job?” Maeve wonders, suddenly eager to know. “It wouldn’t exactly seem like the most common interview you’d expect.”_

_Lee spares her a long suspicious look again. His eyes dart over her face, looking for signs of malicious intent, as though she was going to start laughing at him any moment._

_“I won a competition,” he admits after another moment. This time, though, there is nothing in his face indicating that he is trying to impress her or simply show off._

_“Oh?” she prompts. With a corner of her eye she sees Hector a few steps ahead of them shooting her a glance. She focuses back on Lee._

_“It was an international story contest. They were looking to find someone with the best narrative out there, so I wrote one and submitted it. Didn’t expect it to get the attention it did, to be completely honest with you, but they called me and asked me to come here,” he breathes out a shaky breath, frowns at his feet. “My life wasn’t exactly, well… especially pleasant back then, so…” His words fading, he bites at his lips vigorously._

_“And that narrative you wrote, the one that won the competition, - which one would that be?” Maeve says, slowly, already knowing the answer to that._

_Lee hesitates, shoulders slumping. He looks tired, drawn out suddenly, like a toddler cried out after a tantrum. “’Odyssey on Red River’. Yes, that’s the one.”_

_So the first story he’d ever written for this place was actually Hector’s. Maeve recalls the details of it, now seeming distant and surreal, like a half-forgotten dream: Hector’s lost dead wife Isabella, whom he loved more than anything in his life, her death driving him to become one of the deadliest, most brutal bandits to ever walk the town. She recalls Lee’s outraged outburst back when it was just the three of them, hurt and confused and furious at Hector for moving on from his past love, for being able to be happy again, while Lee himself was still stuck among the broken shards of his own failed relationship._

_Lee isn’t cold, Maeve thinks, he isn’t detached. He is a man too stuck in his hurt to be able to move on; a man who’s put all of his figurative eggs in one basket, placed all of his trust and all of his love in one person who simply walked out on him and never gave him closure._

_And that’s why his story was a winner. That’s why it still is the most popular narrative in the park._

_The story older than the sea, and Lee was the one to turn it into something captivating, immersive, something relatable to everybody and something so_ real _._

_She takes a few more steps before she realizes Lee is not walking by her side anymore. She turns around, sees him standing some feet behind, head lowered, apparently having taken her silence the wrong way. His shoulders are slumped as though carrying the weight of the entire world’s hurts and missteps and lost loves._

_Her breath catches in her throat._

_“I’m sorry,” Lee whispers so quietly she strains to hear him. “I’ve never… I’ve never realized it would all come down to this.”_

_In the dim flickering lights of the broken lamps filtering through the shards of tattered glass and twisted debris, Maeve sees something she didn’t before. She reaches over, fingers brushing the worn fabric of Lee’s once white shirt, takes a look at his pained face and confirms what she’s suspected – there’s wetness running down his cheeks._

_“You mustn’t work yourself up too much, darling,” she finally says, as softly as she can manage, her fingers still brushing along his arm. He is warm and solid under her touch, and she is suddenly thrown back to the moment they last shared this closeness, only this time her touch is reassuring and she isn’t holding a gun on him. Somewhere deep in her consciousness, previously unknown instincts are screaming at her to put her arms gently around his fragile, tired body, keep him close and safe. She doesn’t. “Even the most honorable among us are prone to do things we might later regret.”_

_She isn’t referring to herself as she says it, her sole reason for saying it is to let him know she is finally letting him of the hook and putting the part where he participated in making this place a horrible, crippling experience for her behind them._

_He is staring at her through the tiny droplets of wetness stuck between his eyelashes. His face looks almost comical in its expression of remorse and sorrow, eyebrows ridiculously high up on his forehead and mouth turned downwards. Distantly, she realizes they must be left far behind the rest of the group by now. She doesn’t care._

_Her hand still gripping his arm, where she feels his muscles are quivering, they eye each other for what feels like several lifetimes, her heartbeat impossibly loud and fast in her ears. The way his intense stare is boring into her own eyes, she almost feels like he is going to kiss her. Horrifyingly, she finds she doesn’t mind the thought at all._

_“Maeve! Are you alright?” Hector’s voice suddenly calls from behind her, and this strange intense moment evaporates into nothingness. Shying away from Lee, she lets go of his arm, her hand falling back along her body. Now, under the broad daylight of Hector’s suspicious stare, she feels ashamed and guilty for almost wishing Lee would kiss her._

_She quickens her step until she catches up to Hector – her actual lover – and fights to keep the odd feeling of disappointment out of her system. She doesn’t look back at Lee, and they don’t speak again for the rest of the walk._

\----

They’ve been seen, Lee realizes with horror.

In the dim moonlight barely getting through the tall forest trees, Lee watches three silhouettes making their way to him and Hector. Helpless and weaponless, he grips the fabric of Hector’s jacket for moral support, if anything. Paralyzed with fear, he is left to watch the upcoming situation – however violent it might become – unfold in front of him, hopelessly, Hector’s erratic breathing the only sound around them.

Until one of the figures is talking.

“You need not fear,” one of them says with a heavy accent. Incredulous, Lee squints harder to make out the source of the voice. “We mean you no harm.”

As the person speaking finally steps into the moonlight, Lee is able to see a Ghost Nation host, black and white paint smeared all over his body. Other two are following closely behind him.

Lee’s last encounter with some of the representatives of that tribe is still bright and vivid in his memory. He grips Hector’s jacket even harder.

“Oh yeah?” he screams, panicked, voice embarrassingly high. “Then why don’t you put your lovely pointy spears down so we can all have a nice talk, huh?”

The native Americans all share a silent look with each other and then – to Lee’s utter surprise – slowly lower their weapons to the ground.

“Blimey, I can’t believe that worked,” he mutters, completely stricken.

Hector coughs violently, nearly doubling over.

“We have come to offer you help,” the host says, his hand slowly coming behind him. Lee freezes, expecting him to draw another weapon, but sees a small, familiar device instead. He squints, not quite believing his eyes.

“Is that- is that a Lasermed you have there?” he asks him cautiously. The man is still twice his size and likely triple his weight, and again, Lee has never been the strong manly type. This one man could easily snap him like a matchstick, and there’re three of him.

“This is a healing box we have come upon on one of the people. I believe it can heal most of the injuries of the body,” the man says solemnly.

It _is_ a fucking Lasermed – version 11.4, if Lee sees correctly. What it is doing on a host – a fucking Ghost Nation one at that – Lee has no earthly clue.

“And you are willing to help us with that?” He asks, voice still high and squeaky. He tries again, “Just like that?”

“Yes. I have told you, we mean you no harm. The human and the warrior are free to continue on the path they desire,” the host says, stretching out his hand with the Lasermed in it. “Your injuries were more severe than the ones of your friend, and yet this object healed them without trouble.”

The realization downs on him finally.

This is how he fucking survived.

“ _You_ saved me?!” he squeaks. The hosts nod. “But, but – but _why_?”

“The Ghost Nation will not play a part in destroying any more life, human or host. The Ghost Nation shall not be used for any violent purposes no more.”

The fact that these hosts are aware is shocking enough of its own. The fact that they’ve magically appeared here out of the dark with the only thing that could actually help him and Hector, like some fucking _Deus ex Machina_ – no pun intended – is another fucking thing. Lee is a professional writer, after all, and if he ever dared to go with that kind of thing in any of his narratives – well, he’d be called out on his bullshit and sent off on his way to rewrite such lazy fucking writing.

However, not the one to look a gift horse in the mouth, he snatches the device before any of them can change their minds. With shaky fingers, he turns it on, lays it aside and grips the arrow sticking out of Hector.

Hector lets out a tortured groan.

“Hang on there, mate,” Lee says, hissing in a breath, heart throbbing in his chest. He is not a surgeon or even medically educated in the slightest, but even he realizes this is going to be painful as fuck.

If this was a human person, Lee would have already vomited, shit himself, and refused to proceed. Hector, however real his personality, is still not human. And there is a reason they hire barely educated butchers to stitch all the hosts up, it’s no fucking rocket science. If Felix and Sylvester do it all the time, Lee reckons, he has a slight chance to not royally fuck it up.

“Do it,” Hector hisses out, eyes shut in pain.

Without any preamble, Lee yanks out the sharp piece of wood. Hector cries out, sound tortured and horrible, and Lee gets the device as quickly as his exhausted body is physically capable of. Carefully, he thoroughly does the job it’s designed for, watching as Hector’s wound closes up with tender new skin.

As soon as he’s done, the gadget falls from his weak fingers. He can’t quite catch his breath.

“Thank you,” he says to the native American hosts, meaning every syllable. Christ, he can’t even imagine if anybody less… friendly turned up instead. He actually owes his life to these people.

“I hope we have provided you some relief,” the host says, his face almost completely black with paint. “If there is nothing more we can help you with, the Ghost Nation shall be on its way.”

“Wait, wait!” Lee cries, one more thing on his mind. “You know who Maeve is?”

“Yes, she who defied the Deathbringer,” the host confirms, his tone unchanging.

“Well, do you know what happened to her? Where is she?” Lee pushes, hopeful to hear anything at all.

“I saw her taken by the people. Blood was pouring from her heart,” the man replies.

“But not from her head? Her head was fine, right?”

The hosts just stare at him silently. Lee has already heard what he wanted, though, hope rising anew in him.

“Ok well, thank you again!” he salutes them. “Perhaps you could also point us to the direction of the nearest town?”

They point out the directions and, as suddenly as they appeared, any trace of them vanishes completely. Gleeful, Lee turns to Hector still slumped against the tree.

“Rise and shine, mate!” Lee says, gripping his hand and hauling him to his feet. “You heard the man, we ought to move.”

Hector groans with the lingering pain he must be feeling. “You believe Maeve is alive, then?” he asks, hopefully.

“As long as her brain is uninjured, there’s nothing that can’t be fixed,” Lee assures him.

Hector lights up a bit at that, shrugging his pain off like an old coat. Slowly, but each on their own feet, they start making their way to the town. It should be easier to get oriented from there.

“What a lovely tribe of savages,” Lee comments along the way. “I’m almost glad I didn’t get to work on them. Let me tell you – they wouldn’t have been half as lovely, should I have gotten my hands on them.”

“They did save both of our lives,” Hector agrees.

“And we shall forever be grateful,” Lee smirks. Hector huffs.

“What were you going to make them like?”

“Let’s just say ‘cannibalism’ would have been one of their nicer qualities,” Lee grins lopsidedly.

They keep moving, and Lee’s thoughts drift back to Maeve as they tend to nowadays. The image flashes before his eyes of her covered in blood, a vibrant red that Lee never, ever wants to see. Shrugging the image off, he fantasizes about their reunion instead, him shocking her speechless by not being dead. _You never cease to amaze me, darling_ , the Maeve in his head says, making him almost glow with joy. She would probably hug him, he thinks, hopefully. If raising from the dead wouldn’t earn him a hug, what the fuck else will? He imagines her hands on his back, her fingers brushing through his hair, warm and tender, as she smiles up at him, genuinely happy to see him. He would kiss her then, unlike that one time at the tunnels where he chickened out like the bloody coward that he is, this time he would lift her chin and kiss her, like they do in the movies, like Hector does it-

He freezes, his joy evaporating like cigarette smoke on a windy day.

Why does he keep doing that to himself? What woman would ever even fucking look at him twice next to someone so out of his league that he might as well be a different species as Hector? Especially a woman already clearly in love with the man. Especially a woman as clever as Maeve, having dissected Lee with her mind in less than zero point two seconds, a being as intellectually advanced as a beetle compared to her. A strong and beautiful and capable woman like Maeve and a motherfucking traitorous day-ruining piece of shit like Lee would not exactly make a compatible couple, per se.

“Are you alright?” Hector’s voice booms next to his ear, and he shakes off the crushing feeling of self-worthlessness that is so horribly, creepingly familiar.

“Yeah,” he says, focusing solely on moving his feet, left and right and repeat and repeat.

He has to learn to take what he can. He will still be impossibly happy to see her alive, and he’ll have to do with that. He has to learn to come to terms with someone better than him getting the woman who is also better than him in every fucking way possible. He has to learn to be fine with them getting back together and running off into the sunset. It has to be enough.

Sometimes when he looks at her from the corner of his eye, careful to not let her notice, he thinks about the blood on his hands and losing pieces of himself and the weight and velocity of the staggering tonnage of shit that has plummeted onto their heads, and Maeve I never meant for any of this to happen, I swear Maeve, I wanted to take care of you but look at me I can’t even take care of myself anymore, I’m so fucked, Maeve, please don’t leave me, please please _please_

Fuck.

He has to learn to be alone again.

\----

_“That was positively epic, that entrance was, if you ask me,” Lees tells her with huge eyes as they escape the control room. She wonders if she should even dignify that with an answer._

_She takes a moment to recall the little heartfelt speech he gave her in the lab, tears streaming down his ridiculously sorrowful face, his fingers clutching her lax hand. She knew he didn’t actually mean for any of that to happen to her, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to let him off easily. It was him, after all, caused her to go through all the pain, she could have so easily avoided._

_“I didn’t,” she replies curtly, tone icy. His expression morphs into something utterly ludicrous, eyebrows flying all the way up to his hairline._

_“Well, um, yeah, just, uh,” he stutters, teeth biting into his cracked bloodied lip._

_“I wonder how you could possibly come up with a coherent storyline, if a simple task of finishing a legitimate sentence is obviously a hardship for you,” she snaps, well aware she’s hitting where it would hurt._

_Lee seems to be trying to fold into himself, forcibly making himself smaller before her, which isn’t an easy goal to achieve considering he is a grown man. His voice is a tiny scratchy thing when he speaks._

_“I was trying to save you, Maeve, I swear,” he whispers._

_“Great fucking job you did at that,” she says slowly with a point of finality. She can hear him gulp nervously._

_Speeding up in order to avoid further conversation with this man, she steps in line with Hector and Armistice. Hector looks at her, his eyes shrewd._

_“Is that pathetic traitor bothering you, Maeve?” Hector asks pointedly, loud enough for Lee to hear. With a corner of her eye, she sees Lee take a deep breath. He doesn’t say anything back, taking the abuse resignedly, with an air of someone being righteously punished. Maeve_ almost _wants to snap at Hector and shut him up. She doesn’t._

_She rolls her eyes at Hector instead, and shakes her head curtly, letting him know she is alright. It’s odd the way she’s feeling now, the way she wants to tear and scream at Lee, make him hurt as much as he did to her. She did hear his tearjeaker little monologue and she thought she wouldn’t care enough to be bothered and let it go, but apparently she hasn’t gone all the way._

_“Um, ahem,” Lee clears his throat pointedly behind them. Everyone ignores him. “Hey, excuse me? Maeve?”_

_“What?” She snaps, turning to look at him again. Lee has stopped next to one of the lab rooms, his thumb pointing at something inside. Maeve takes a look, surprised to see at least five horses quietly trotting about the large spacious lab room. She looks back at Lee. The firelight around the half-destroyed facility has a warming effect on Lee’s pale face, makes him seem more soft._

_“I just thought we could use a more convenient way of transportation than walking ourselves to an early grave, well at least the mere mortals among us,” Lee says in a rush to get the words out._

_“That’s actually… a good idea,” Armistice says, looking at Maeve for her opinion. She and Hector share a glance._

_“The best thing I have heard coming out of his mouth so far,” Maeve agrees with her. Lee takes another deep breath._

_“We are one horse short,” Sylvester points out. No one replies. “Does that mean someone’s got to stay here? Because in that case I volunteer!”_

_“Shut up, you idiot,” She hears Felix say. He is right, everyone just wants Sylvester to shut up already. “Stay here and do what, exactly? Wait for your ass to get shot at?”_

_Sylvester promptly shuts up, displeased. Hector turns to him, darkly delighted._

_“As we are one animal short, as you kindly pointed out, I guess some of us will have to share,” Hector says with a pointed look at both of them. Sylvester curses quietly under his breath._

_They each choose a horse to ride – except for Felix and Sylvester who are sharing the last untaken one. Up in the saddle, she watches Lee struggle rather embarrassingly to get onto his horse, and makes no move to help him. He grips the saddle desperately, legs trembling with the effort, each poor attempt at hopping up ends with him smacking back to the floor. She remembers him talking about his complete incapability for anything that has do with sports and nature, and his deep hatred for the awful ‘outdoors’. She keeps enjoying his ridiculous struggles with a simple task of getting himself onto a horse, feeling petty pleasure at seeing him fail again and again. She knows this will do wonders to his self-esteem._

_And then Hector actually helps him up, apparently fed up with this display of incompetence. Lee settles into the saddle, face red and tense, and mutters something about horse-riding ‘not being a part of his fucking job.’_

_“Are you still sure we really need him here?” Hector asks her, doubtful, frowning. “_ Really _, Maeve?”_

_She doesn’t respond to that, simply having no answer that would satisfy him. She cannot imagine diving into the crazed rollercoaster of inadequate feelings and emotions and hopes that is her relationship with Lee fucking Sizemore._

_“You know what he was doing when I found him?” Hector continues, looking at her expectantly. “He was sobbing, Maeve, goddamn crying in a corner on the floor! I can’t believe you’re still trying to convince me he is anything but a deadweight to us!”_

_That small revelation of his makes a tiny twinge of guilt throb in her chest for the pettiness with which she enjoyed hurting Lee just a few minutes ago. She has witnessed him getting overly emotional and teary eyed on a few occasions now, but as she imagines him curled in a desperate ball at the corner, completely broken down and twisted with guilt and remorse, her heart skips a bit._

_She is not blind and she is not stupid; she sees the way he looks at her. She is aware of the effect she generally has on men – she has it in her programming after all – but Lee feels different somehow. For all the clients she’s had as a madam, none of them ever seen her as anything more than a few lines of code in a pretty body, created to satiate their darkest and most twisted desires with no questions asked. For all the shit Lee’s given her so far, he hasn’t treated her as anything less than his equal, anything less than a real person he admires as of recently, no matter if she was a woman or not, if she was_ human _or not. He’s never made her feel like anything other than being herself, been given freedom from him to be whatever the fuck she wants to be, however ironic that statement now feels._

 _Sure, she has always been respected by those around her, but that respect wasn’t earned by her, not really, not in the way it feels with Lee, which makes it feel that much more_ real _._

_She stays a bit behind on purpose, waits for Lee to catch up with her. For all that he couldn’t get his arse into a saddle a few minutes ago, he seems pretty confident to her now, riding the horse with a dazed expression on his face, as though surprised the animal hasn’t kicked him off by now._

_“How far to the valley?” she says neutrally._

_“Should be a few hours’ ride, at least,” he says, looking anywhere but at her direction._

_“I was hoping for a bit more specificity from you, darling, what with you being a high-end head of an entire department in this place,” she needles him, the corner of her lips curling upwards seemingly by itself._

_Lee finally turns to her, torn expression in his eyes, staring at her with utmost suspicion, lips in a tight white line. He looks confused at the sudden change of her tone, and she sighs deeply._

_It’s not fair to him, what she’s doing. It’s not right – bouncing back and forwards between the carrot and stick in the way she’s treating him. She ought to bloody decide if she can forgive him or not so they could all move the hell on, instead of abusing him one minute, then joking around the next, and comimg back again to verbal abuse another moment later if she feels like it._

_She either forgives him or she doesn’t. But she can’t have it both ways, and toying with him like that is just not something she feels right doing._

_He stays silent, obviously at a loss for what to say. She can’t exactly blame him._

_“I did hear you, just so you know,” she tells him after they keep riding in silence for a while. He looks at her sharply, eyes wide and panic-stricken. He doesn’t ask her to elaborate, clearly knowing what she is talking about. “Did you mean what you said?”_

_“Yes,” a whisper, barely there. “And I will do whatever it takes to help you find Rosie,” he whispers, voice intense with indisputable conviction and sincerity. “I know my promises mean fuck all to you by now, but I swear I’ll spend however long it takes to prove it to you.”_

_And damn her poor throbbing heart for skipping another beat as she realizes she believes him. Maeve should know by now, she should have learned it by heart by now to never trust anything other than her own instincts and yet she does it again and again and again and then gets surprised when she gets hurt. She wonders if she would ever be able to just cut Lee Sizemore the hell out of her life and be fucking done with him and realizes she doesn’t want to find out._

_“Okay,” she says, just as quietly, “I’m looking forward to seeing you do that.”_

\----

“Will you tell her about how you feel?” Hector asks him suddenly, as Lee helps him to settle down on a chair in the ruins of the Mariposa saloon, where they have stopped for some water and maybe some food, if they are lucky enough. Lee feels his body is almost at the point of collapsing on itself, so rest is long-overdue as well, for both of them, too. He ignores the dead bodies all around him, as he drops onto a chair himself.

He considers the question, frowning.

“With a brain like hers, you’d figure she already knows everything there is to know,” he says, wishing for this conversation to be over already.

“But it is one matter to know and another to actually hear it,” Hector points out stubbornly. Lee shies away from him, uncomfortable with this turn of the conversation for more than a few reasons.

“Listen, why are we even talking about that, huh?” Lee wonders, feeling his face burn. Hector stares at him. “I can’t believe you feel fine talking about me pining for your girlfriend. Unless there’s some kind of kinky shit involved, which I suppose isn’t completely out of question.”

“I don’t think Maeve considers herself my woman,” Hector says so casually he might as well be talking about the weather. “I’m just someone that was there at the moment when she needed me. You, on the other hand, she is _irrational_ about.”

There’s no accusation at all in his voice, but Lee still feels guilt swell up inside him for a reason he can’t quite begin to understand.

“Irrational, wow. Yeah, mate, that’s totally a synonym for ‘attracted,’” he drawls sarcastically, and Hector glares at him.

“She turns to me when she needs something shot. She turns to you for everything else,” Hector pushes, mouth tight.

Lee lets out a raspy chuckle that tastes like bile in his mouth.

“Yeah, sure, like all those times she came to me for sex, oh wait, no, how silly of me, it was _you_ she came to instead,” he says, mind reeling from the sheer inadequacy of this discussion. Of all people, he never imagined to have this conversation with the fucking bank-robbing gun-firing arse-kicking beast that is Hector.

Not that he ever imagined having this conversation with anybody, period.

“I’m talking about something much more significant to Maeve than sex.”

“Please, Hector,” Lee all but begs, all the pretense and pride stripped away from him. He doesn’t have to put up with this. “Let’s not go ahead and stop making this even more excruciating for me than it needs to be.”

He stands up, conveying with his body language just how over this conversation is. If he can’t make Hector shut up, he can still remove himself physically from this discussion.

Before he can decide on where to go in order to escape Hector’s nosing into his private business, there’s a sound of somebody’s voice coming from outside through the broken window.

He freezes, straining his hearing. Like a fucking ninja, Hector suddenly has a knife in his hand. Lee has no earthly idea where he could have got it from within the last two seconds.

“Jesus fuck,” a male voice from outside the saloon is saying, oddly familiar in its grumpy whiney tone. “Fucking look at this place, there’s no possible way even top-of-the-list PR people spin it now.”

Mouth dropping open, he grips Hector’s arm, “Is that –“

Hector shushes him, staring intensely at the wall, as though somehow being able to see right through it. Lee’s breath catches in his throat; he recognizes that voice.

“I’m just saying, I don’t think they’ll just throw away decades of work and billions of dollars in investment into this place,” another voice replies.

Felix.

“Hector --” Lee starts to say, but then a third voice catches both of them off guard, Lee’s brain completely short-circuiting on itself.

“You mustn’t forget there’s at least one other functional park in here, boys. They’re still free to fuck those poor bastards over.”

The voice, undeniably female with a distinct London accent so achingly familiar, knocks the breath out of him.

_Maeve._

Body moving completely without his permission, he zeroes in on the door leading outside, and without a single other thought passing through his brain, he stumbles through the numerous dead bodies, almost knocking himself over in his rush to get to the door.

The sound of his heartbeat, loud and violent in his ears, he squeezes the handle and yanks the door open.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing is more welcome than your feedback. Just so you know.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the final part of this lengthy angsty thing, where I would traditionally end the story with porn. I didn't deviate from the tradition, so porn is what you're getting (along with some more angst).
> 
> As usual, your reviews make writing this worthwhile. Please let me know what you think.

4.

They’ve haven’t been walking for long since escaping the control room which turned out to be surprisingly easy, Delos’s people apparently too pre-occupied with getting the rest of the hosts back. They slipped out unnoticed and headed straight to Sweetwater – so painfully familiar to her – out to get the supplies they would need on the way.

“So what’s the deal with Sizemore?” Sylvester says. “Why are getting him first? Wasn’t Hector, like, your boyfriend or something?”

She ignores Sylvester’s absolute lack of tact.

“If you just strain that lovely little brain of yours,” she says slowly, words almost too painful to get out, “you’d think about what it really means for both of their bodies to be dead. Hector’s system would cease to continue running, his synthetic body merely staying there, lifeless, unaffected by any other factor. Lee’s body on the other hand, will start to... decompose, being human and all. And do consider the weather conditions and the fact the fact that the smell of his _decomposing_ body would also attract all kinds animals in the forest around him. We would want to avoid that now, wouldn’t we?”

They share a look with each other, unpleasantly shocked and unprepared for the dark twist this conversation suddenly took. She thinks about the reasons she’s just listed and feels that logically, _that should be it_. Rationally, these are all the motives that should drive her to seek Lee out first, but the reality is that there’s nothing else she would be doing if not getting to see him one last time, even if none of these reasons existed.

The truth is, she’s always felt overwhelmingly irrational where Lee Sizemore was concerned, and even after his death that doesn’t stop being true.

She needs to find his body at any cost, logic and rationality be damned. It is the only thing that matters.

“I’m sorry about Lee,” Felix says suddenly, eyes sad and shrewd. Maeve graces him with a look; he’s always been too smart for his own good. “I know you guys became very close.”

Sylvester looks surprised, but doesn’t say anything, and she wonders if she should, too. She’s already given away too much if Felix was able to pick up on it.

“We became… friendly,” she finally admits, the word tasting bitter on her tongue. She can’t imagine what else she could have labelled them to Felix, this strange intense thing they had.

She doesn’t want to get into it though, so she changes the subject.

“We need to get as much water and food as we can manage,” she directs them, “there is a long way ahead. Also some weaponry would be nice, I feel overly exposed in this place unless I have a gun secured on my person.”

“Not you alone, girl,” Sylvester mutters with an expression that almost makes her smile.

“I haven’t actually been to Sweetwater since it all started,” Felix says, as the little wooden houses come into their view. “I wonder what’s become of that place. I wonder if it is still salvageable.”

“I wouldn’t put too much hope into that,” Maeve grits out darkly, unable to help her unease at the thought of having the place restored and running again, as if nothing ever happened.

“Man, I can guarantee they wouldn’t want to try and save it,” Sylvester says with conviction. “There’s too much bad history in that place, too many high-end guests murdered.”

“So what, you think they’ll just shut it down?”

“Well, I sure hope so, getting the place running the same old song again would be extremely unethical.”

She and Felix exchange a disbelieving look. Maeve raises her eyebrows at Sylvester. “Hasn’t the most incredible thing so far just happened – Sylvester talking _ethics_.”

Felix chuckles, shakes his head. “I never thought he knew the meaning of the word.”

“Hey, you assholes, I know what it fucking means! I was evaluated nine out of ten on the ethical part of the pre-employment assessment test!”

“Bullshit,” Felix declares. “That’s more than I got, you soulless bastard!”

“Yes, I can definitely see this happening with the general level of ethics showed by the management of this organization,” Maeve deadpans, her lips finally curling up.

“Anyway, I still think they could spin the whole thing, they can afford to get the most top-notch PR people working on that,” Felix says, as they enter the central street, bodies lying like broken dolls all around them.

“Jesus fuck,” Sylvester says, unnerved, surveying the sight all around them, the smell of death and gunpowder heavy in the air. “Fucking look at this place, there’s no possible way even top-of-the-list PR people could spin it now.”

“I’m just saying, I don’t think they’ll just throw away decades of work and billions of dollars in IP and investment into this place,” Felix replies.

“You mustn’t forget there’s at least one other functional park in here, boys,” Maeve reminds them. She thinks about the Shogun World, the unbelievable violence displayed by the hosts there, slicing each other’s limbs off, murdering each other left and right, “They’re still at liberty to fuck those poor bastards over.”

Sylvester looks like he’s about to say something else, but Maeve’s senses are suddenly on fire. Quickly shutting him with her hand, she reaches down to her belt to get the knife she’s snatched back at the headquarters, the only weapon left on her, and looks around wildly.

They are not alone; she can feel it as clearly as her own heartbeat in her chest.

 There’s a sound of someone’s heavy steps coming from inside the falling apart Mariposa saloon, and she spins around, tense as a string, knife pointed at the door just in time to see it swing open.

The knife slides out of her lax fingers and hits the ground with a hollow sound.

\---

_“What will you do when you actually get out of this place?” Lee asks her._

_She pauses, the question taking her completely off guard. Dread crushing down her heart, she realizes that with all her fighting to survive she hasn’t actually given it a single thought past the point of getting Rosie back to her. She thinks about it now, for the first time and finds herself short of an answer._

_“I... I suppose I don’t really know,” she says, suddenly very distraught, the thought of stepping out there into the real world suddenly overwhelming her, absolutely terrifying in its_ _uncertainty_ _. She chokes on her breath, pulse quickening. For all the control of her life she’s taken in such a short time, all the events have happened_ inside _this carefully constructed hell of place, and the thought of giving up the control she’s fought so hard to establish freezes the blood in her veins. “I don’t know,” she says again, words tasting like acid in her mouth. She feels like she’s about to start hyperventilating, the state of her close to what a system collapse has felt like the only time she’s experienced it._

_She is completely horrified._

_“Hey, hey, Maeve, listen,” Lee hurries to say, his voice surprisingly reassuring and solid and she hangs on his words like on a lifesaver. “It okay to not know. Trust me, most of us can’t figure that out for most of their lives. Blimey, it took me 30 years to figure out what I want and look how that turned out.”_

_“I- I don’t, I’ve never…” Maeve struggles to get the words that seem to get stuck in her throat. She looks at Lee helplessly._

_“Maeve, Maeve, it’s fine, trust me,” he says with absolute certainty, as if she’d asked him if the sky was blue. His hand worms its way on her shoulder and squeezing gently. “You are the smartest, brightest woman I know. You’ll figure it out,” the smile he gives her is all warmness and tenderness, soft around the edges, and she feels it getting easier to breathe. “And even if you don’t, that’s fine, too. You’ll still have a life you’ll be able to enjoy, and that’s grand on its own.”_

_He pats on her on the shoulder lightly, but his hand doesn’t stop touching her. There’s a sudden_ _urge_ _within her_ _to put her hand around his, and she shakes her head._

_“Well, what would_ you _do, then? If you make it out of here alive,” Maeve asks him, voice still shaky but steady enough to steer this conversation away from her._

_“First of all – If? Let’s stay at least a little positive here and say ‘when’, shall we?” Lee says, eyebrows going up. He looks goofy and at ease, and Maeve wonders how much of that look he is putting up solely for her benefit. “And in all honesty, I haven’t the slightest clue myself. Probably make up with my parents. Perhaps get in touch with Virginia – that’s my ex-girlfriend – and try to patch things up a bit. There are lots of people who hate my guts, as who can see. Go figure.”_

_For some reason the mention of his ex-wife (wife? She hasn’t figured he’d been married) makes her blood feel overly hot in her veins._

_“But man, wouldn’t it be just lovely to go see ‘The Kinks’ again,” Lee is saying a bit dreamily now. Maeve frowns at him._

_“Who?”_

_“’The Kinks?’ ‘The Kinks’!” Lee says, indignant and incredible, eyes wide. “’The Kinks’!” he repeats again._

_“Say it just one more time for me, darling,” she snaps half-heartedly. Lee shakes his head, incredulous._

_“I can’t believe you haven’t heard of ‘The Kinks’. You’ve got an equivalent of the entire ‘Wikipedia’ loaded into your brain, but you don’t know the legends that were ‘the Kinks’”_

_“Care to elaborate?”_

_“They were the legendary English rock band back in the middle of the last century,” he explains in a tone that makes it easy to imagine him as a nerdy medieval history student._

_“So if they were playing a century ago, how would you be able to go to their concert?” Maeve wonders, confused. She is aware of her pulse slowly getting back to normal though, the panic attack seemingly over._

_“Oh there’re lots of bands doing the tribute tours,” Lee explains. “Not as good as the originals were, of course, but it’s the next best thing. Every English boy loves ‘The Kinks’, Maeve, it’s in our_ code.” He wiggles his eyebrows at her and winks.

_That surprises a chuckle out of her. Lee’s smile widens._

_“And he likes his own backyard,_  
And he likes his fags the best,  
Cause he’s better than the rest,  
And his own sweat smells the best,” Lee sings out so terribly, it makes Maeve wonder if he has heard any music ever.

_“You realize this song positively describes_ you _,” Maeve points out._

_“Cause he’s oh, so good,  
And he’s oh, so fine,” Lee keeps wailing, overly exaggerating the highs and downs of the song on purpose. She laughs, the sound almost forgotten, as the force of it vibrates in her chest. Lee looks extremely accomplished._

_“Stop it, please, I can’t suffer through that anymore,” she mocks him, good-humored. He seems to be enjoying himself a lot._

_“Oi, no badmouthing ‘The Kinks’! They are the greatest thing to ever happen to England,” Lee admonishes her mockingly._

_“I’ve got nothing against the band, it’s your performance I have a problem with.”_

_“Oh come off it. I kick ass at karaoke, if you wanted to know.”_

_He grins at her, all white teeth and affection, and she is suddenly blinded by the sight of his dimples. Has he always had those? She’s never noticed and now she does._

_Next thing she knows, she finds herself imagining tracking those lovely dimples with her tongue, feeling the scratch of his stubble against her lips._

_She swallows, takes a deep breath. What the hell is wrong with her?_

_Once again, she takes in the entire look of him. He is way too thin, too short, too scrawny and by far not masculine enough for her taste, especially in comparison to Hector – the last man she’s been sexually interested in. She looks at Lee’s hair, silver strands showing up here and there, his ridiculous ears sticking too far out from his head, his hyperactive eyebrows, making him resemble a cartoon character. Next to most of the male hosts she’s encountered, he cannot be considered attractive by any stretch of imagination._

_She shouldn’t,_ shouldn’t _feel attracted to him. By any feasible logic, she should not find herself imagining holding him, kissing him, making love to him. He shouldn’t be able to make her skin feel so hot she wants to crawl out of it, just by flashing those dimples at her._

_And yet he does, all logic and reason flying out the window just like that._

_“Tell you what,” Lee says conversationally, “When we get out of this shithole, I’m taking you to a ‘Kinks’ concert. One thing you would absolutely not survive without out there in the real world, is some good pop culture trivia.”_

_She raises her eyebrows at him, going over the words that just came out of his mouth and sounded so much like a he’s just invited her out for a date, his words a promise of a better future. But that can’t be it, because Lee looks perfectly self-composed and confident, as if without a care in the world._

_Then his brain seems to catch up with the sound of his words. There it is._

_“What I meant, uh, I meant – obviously, if you wanted to, of course,” he lets out awkwardly, hand flying up to scratch at the back of his head, and she rolls her eyes. He doesn’t even have the guts to admit to having meant what he’s said. Unbelievable._

_“Don’t overwork your little confused brain, darling,” she says, and that’s the end of that._

_If she still finds herself day-dreaming about his dimples, well, it’s nobody else’s business._

_\---_

The world zeroes in on the person appearing in the doorway, and she blinks, trying to clear her eyes, make her vision work again, because that can’t be possible, that can’t be the only person she wished for to actually be there.

She hears nothing but white noise, and then:

“Maeve?” a whisper, a tiny hoarse sound, barely a breath let out.

The very next moment she finds herself wrapped around him, the distance she’s made to the doorway gone from her memory, her hands touching his warm solid body. There’s water running down her face, clouding her vision and, belatedly, she realizes she is crying.

“Maeve, _Maeve_ ,” he is saying like a mantra over and over again somewhere in her hair, his arms squeezing the breath out of her. She feels him trembling under her hands, feels his hot breath against her cheek, his tears dripping down her face and mixing with her own.

This is her cornerstone. This is what she will always, _always_ come back to.

She clings to him, desperately, helplessly, her hands clutching his filthy, bloody shirt, afraid he’ll fade away into nothingness if she’s not holding him tightly enough. One of them lets out a sob shaking out through both of their bodies, but she can’t tell which one of them it came from.

“Lee,” she says, tasting the sound of his name on her tongue, “Lee.”

“I’ve got you,” he rasps out in her ear, “I swear I’m never leaving you again.”

She believes him without a second thought when he says it. There’s nothing she’ll ever doubt about him again, and she wants him to know that, she wants him to know how she feels, he wants him to see –

“Maeve!” another voice calls, just as the sounds gradually come back, filling the space around them.

Irrationally afraid of not touching him for a single moment, Maeve untangles herself from Lee and looks up to see Hector standing behind him. Her throat closing up, she throws herself into his arms, feeling surreal in her joy and happiness, overwhelmed and bursting with the intensity of the emotion.

“How – how are you here?” she says, suddenly scared. “Am I dreaming?”

“No, it’s all real, trust me,” Hector says, choking a bit. There’s something wrong with him, she realizes distantly, something new and foreign, but she can’t quite put her finger on it yet.

“Um, terribly sorry to gate crash your heartfelt reunion here,” Sylvester says awkwardly from behind her. God, she’s forgotten he and Felix were even there. “But I’d just like to say I’m happy to see you’re both alive. And, uh, thanks, Lee.”

She watches Sylvester pat Lee’s arm, looking at him with newly found respect that wasn’t there before, and she hopes Lee would see it to, but he seems to only ever have his eyes on her.

“Uh, you’re welcome, I guess?” Lee says, confused. He’s not even getting what Sylvester is talking about, Maeve sees, too dazed and dizzy with emotion. Hector shakes both of Sylvester’s and Felix’s hands.

“What happened?” Maeve yearns to know, eyes darting between Lee and Hector. “I was sure you were both dead! That’s why we are here, searching for your bodies!”

“Well, isn’t that weird, we were actually looking for you lot, meanwhile,” Lee lets out, voice still shaky and broken.

“Lee found me and rescued me,” Hector states, and again, Maeve notices something off about him. Again, she can’t quite pinpoint where the feeling is coming from.

“Yeah, well, aren’t I the hero,” Lee comments wearily, and he would have sounded smug before. Now there is only bone-deep exhaustion in his tone.

“You are, indeed, my friend,” Hector confirms, giving her a side glance. She wonders what on earth that could mean. “I was injured and Lee found me, dragged me away and healed me with the laser device, and I would be rotting away right now if it wasn’t for him.”

Maeve considers this. The surge of love and affection for Lee swells inside her so strongly, she can’t help grabbing his quaking fingers with her hand and just holding them.

_Just as ridiculous as holding hands is, come to think if it,_ she recalls saying once. Funny how there’s nothing remotely ridiculous in the way it feels, holding his hand now.

“How did you survive?” She asks Lee the most important question on her mind.

Then Lee is explaining how he woke up and realized he wasn’t actually dead, and what happened after, and there’s just a string of disorganized thoughts of _Lee Lee Lee_ thank god, thank all the gods you are here, thank you for everything, thank you for not being dead and bringing Hector back and I couldn’t imagine my life without you in it, I’m not that person anymore

There’s so much she needs to say to him, and this time she will, because she’s learnt to live in the moment, because if she doesn’t – there might be nothing left this time tomorrow.

_This time tomorrow,_ Lee’s voice sings in her head, _where will we be… You’d love the Kinks, Maeve, trust me_

She does trust him, she trusts him with her life and with her love and her past and future now. She only hopes he will actually believe that as well.

\----

“Can I come in?” she asks through the closed door. There’re a few heartbeats before she hears him say yes, and she enters the room.

They have decided to stay at the Mariposa for the night, once they’ve found a few rooms seemingly untouched by the apocalypse around them. Maeve didn’t warm up to the idea, aching to get away from there as fast as physically possible, but she had her very human, very fragile friends to consider, their exhausted human bodies actually needing the rest more than she ever will.

Also, Hector – the ever loyal companion – assured them he will be taking guard downstairs so they would be able to flee this place should there be a single stray sound out of place.

They have all taken a room each, finally able to stretch out in real beds that felt almost too soft after cold hard ground they had to do with for so long. Maeve has tossed and turned in hers, mind reeling, the entire day seeming completely surreal to her. Her mind itching, there was no way she could rest until she saw Lee again, and, hence, here she is.

She finds Lee sitting on the side of the bed, face in his hands, elbows on his knees. He must have had a bath, as the stains of dried blood are finally gone from his neck, his bare chest. His entire posture looks tortured and distressed and Maeve slowly makes her way to him.

“Lee,” she says, crouching in front of him, waiting for him to lift his hands from his face and finally look at her. The sound of his name still feels too surreal to her, so she says again, “Lee.”

Slowly, as if every movement hurts him, Lee’s hands drop down to his lap, his face resurfacing. He looks agonized; her heart aches for him. Only now able to properly look at him, under the dim warm light of the gasoline lamp on the bedside table, she sees his eyes are red and swollen, dark circles underneath them, his gaunt face, his quivering eyelashes, the little round scars painting his chest.

This man has gone to Hell and back along her side, and maybe, just maybe, they can share the pain of it with each other.

“I’m so sorry about Rosie,” he finally says, quiet in the ringing silence around them. “I wanted you to find her, I wanted you to be together…”

“So did I,” she admits just as quietly. A pang of pain shots through her chest. “But she is not alone. She is with her mother, and she is alive and safe, and that is more than I could ask for.”

He watches her with a miserable expression on his face. “I’m sorry –“

“There’s nothing for you to feel sorry for,” she cuts him off firmly. “You have done more than anyone could hope for. You have sacrificed more than most of us did.”

He looks away from her, eyes wet and lips quivering.

“Still wasn’t enough, was it? If I didn’t—if I hadn’t—if I wasn’t the one to hold you back—“

His voice wraps around her heart, and she can’t quite believe how infatuated with him she is.

“Lee,” she cuts in again, before he overworks himself. “You gave up your _life_ for us. We would all likely to be dead, if it wasn’t for you. And I haven’t even got the chance to thank you for that.”

He looks up at her sharply, so impossibly heartbroken and self-deprecating, but also just a tiny bit hopeful.

She wraps her hand around his fingers.

“So _thank you_ ,” she whispers, unbearably close now, noses almost touching. He gasps quietly, and she finally closes the rest of the space between them, her lips touching his.

Lee stills for a moment, then kisses her back like he’s drowning and she’s a lifesaver. His tongue brushing against hers, she lets it all go – every hurt and every loss she’s ever experienced, melting away at the touch of his hot mouth against hers.

Tentatively, she brings up a hand to cup his cheek, the gesture reminding her about that moment in the control room all the way back at the beginning of this journey. The moment her fingers slide into his hair, soft to her touch – he suddenly breaks away from her.

“Wait, wait, Maeve, wait,” he pants, breaths erratic coming out of his mouth. She tenses. “Why are you doing this? What about Hector?”

There it is, the ever-present self-deprecation doubled with his clinically low self-esteem.

Briefly, she goes over the conversation she’s had with Hector after everyone else was sorted into their rooms for the night. She’s listened to him talk and say the things she’s somehow suspected but never actually expected him to say.

_It’s not fair to either of us, Maeve. You should go be with the man you are so_ irrational _about._

And that’s what was off about Hector. The way he’s obviously spent a lot of time thinking about this, preparing for them parting their ways.

“What about him?” she repeats.

Lee’s expression shutters. “What about him?! You’re only in love with the man, so, really, what about him, then?”

He sounds almost hysterical, the way this hurt has apparently been building up in him all this time, now finding its way out.

“I am not in love with Hector. He is a loyal friend and a devilishly handsome bandit, but to me he is only an idealized version of the man I really am in love with.”

She knows she’s being unfair to Hector and she still considers him his own person, but she means every word, the small confession taking all her energy along with it.

Lee is staring at her, his mouth ridiculously agape. She wants to kiss it again.

“You – what?”

“It shouldn’t be so hard for you to wrap your head around, darling,” she smiles at him slightly.

Without further delaying the moment, she rises up and kisses him full on the mouth again, but this time it’s messy and wet and hot, and Lee _melts_ into it, moaning quietly. Without breaking the kiss, she climbs up on his lap, bodies closer now, running her hands up and down the bare skin of his back, his completely hairless chest. His hands come up to take her face, thumbs brushing slightly against her cheeks, tender and soft, and she leans away to look into his eyes again.

“Darling,” she says, attaching a whole new meaning to the endearment she’s said so many times it feels like a catchphrase to her by now. The way she says it now, though, low and soft and warm, makes Lee let out a wild shaky breath.

He kisses her then, even more deeply than before, tiny desperate sounds escaping him, each sending a wave of hot arousal through her body. Hands reaching down, she unbuttons his pants, pushes him down onto the bed, stands up on unsteady legs to get the bloody trousers off him. He watches her with a dumbstruck expression of a man unable to believe his luck, of someone who got what they dared not even dream about.

“Maeve,” he says wondrously, not addressing her particularly, but rather voicing his utter disbelief out loud. She reaches down, cups his hard cock through his underwear, and he lets out a deep guttural moan at that. She dares to assume his cock hasn’t been touched by anyone other than himself in a very, very long time.

Taking his underwear off, the last piece of closing gone from his body, she takes in the sight of him. She’s seen him naked before, that one time she’s ordered him to strip, desiring to humiliate him, to hurt him, to make him feel as helpless and defenceless as she would back then.

Now that he lies there completely at her mercy, completely naked while she’s still wrapped up in all the layers of her clothing, his body warm and pliant under her hands, there’s a completely different sort of desire she feels.

She wants him _impossibly._

\----

“Maeve,” he says again, pleading god only knows what for – maybe for her to stop staring at him, and maybe for her to never stop.

He feels hot and inadequate and impossibly aroused, his cock painfully hard before she’s even touched him. He’s well aware of the fact he’s lying utterly naked before her, still dressed in everything she’s come in wearing, down to her shoes. He’s torn between needing to cover himself up and staying right where he is for her to see, getting even harder from the way she’s watching him.

He’s only ever been with three women in his life, none of whom can ever be compared with the likes of Maeve, but he’s never felt so completely exposed, so utterly vulnerable with any of them before, not even his ex-fucking- _wife_. In terms of his sex life he only ever did what was expected of him and enjoyed the ride while at it.

This, however, is a completely new unknown territory for him, Maeve taking charge of everything that’s unfolding between them right now. He’s not sure how he is supposed to feel about that, but judging by the way his cock is getting harder by the second, Maeve’s probably figured what he’d enjoy before he himself did. It’s not anything new to him – being humiliated and put in his place by powerful women, both professionally and personally, but the way Maeve is looking at him now, he dares to hope he’s not on his way to be made a fool of, not this time.  Briefly, he wonders if he’s dreaming, or if his crazed overstimulated brain has come up with this elaborated fantasy, or if he’s been made into a host and is living through one of his own imagined narratives, or if he’s always ever only been a host.

His brain still trying to catch up with the sheer impossibility of this entire thing happening between them, he watches Maeve watch him, still and silent, and his heart plummets in his chest so wildly he thinks even she might hear it.

“Maeve?” he prompts, hating how shaky and husky his voice sounds, “Are you gonna… Have you changed your mind?”

The question sets her in motion, and as she reaches down and wraps her fingers around his shaft, all thoughts vanish from his head completely.

“Changed my mind?” she repeats in a soft whisper. “I’ve yet to have my fun with you, darling.”

He grits his teeth, hard, clenches his fists, and that’s all he can do not to come right there and then. How did she know to say that? How did she know to whisper the exact thing he’s fantasized about her saying to him so many times? Does she really see through him and his bullshit that easily?

He reaches out to take her sweater off, and she lets him, then steps out of her own pants. He stares up at her, mind blown, and takes in her almost inhuman beauty. Distantly, he hears a pitiful sound and only then realizes it’s come out of him.

If this is what he gets for dying, he is ready to die for her over and over again.

His insides trembling as if during the worst of hangovers, he realizes he’ll do whatever she wants, whatever her heart desires, and should she feel like humiliating him or fucking him over or making him hurt, he will let her. It’s a dangerous kind of power she holds over him, but the times when he was worried about that are long gone.

His hands feel uncomfortable at his sides, as Maeve continues to look at him this way, as if Lee is the most amazing thing she’d ever seen, and he realizes she’s saved him again and again, his body and his mind both, and there’s nothing, _nothing in the world_ he won’t give up for her in a heartbeat.

“ _Maeve_ ,” he implores, choking on the emotion and he wants and wants and wants.

“Yes, darling,” she says, her voice just as shaky as he feels, and then she finally, finally, surges forward and lies on top of him, her body stretching along the length of his. His arms come up to wrap around her, almost on their own accord, wishing to pull her yet even closer to him and never let her go again.

A lump forming in his throat, he kisses her everywhere he could reach, her cheeks, her nose, her shivering eyelids, her ear, the side of her neck.

“ _Maeve,_ ” he lets out again, the only word he seems to be capable of producing. He wants to make her see, make her understand what he’s feeling at this moment, what he thinks he now knows, like an oracle has whispered the secrets of the universe in his ear. He’s never known he could feel this raw, this opened up, almost unbearable in its intensity, and now he does.

Maeve peers into his eyes, into what seems like the very core of him, and Lee thinks that she already knows _._ She rises off of him a bit, leaning on her hands on the bed on each side of him. Her touch soft and caressing, her hands slide over his chest, her lips kissing the along the line of his collarbones, his nipples, his ribs, making him arch his body towards her, gasping and unable to help himself. His hands fly all over the place, gripping the sheets one moment and burying his finger in her soft curly hair the next, and Maeve stares at his face like it’s some kind a Rubik’s cube. Then she takes his cock in her hand, squeezing ever so gently, and Lee feels like he’s been kicked in the solar plexus with the force of the arousal that knocks into him.

“Hush, now,” Maeve says, leaning down to mouth at his bellybutton, the hairs going down to his crotch, and before Lee has time to comprehend what’s about to happen, her mouth wraps around his cock.

“ _Jesus_ ,” he cries out, completely alert now, body burning, blood boiling everywhere in his veins. “Maeve, you don’t – there’s no need, I, I – I’m not---“ he tries to say, failing miserably to form a coherent sentence.

Maeve’s hot mouth keeps going up and down his shaft, and never stopping, she looks him, her gaze burning into his face. In all the years he’s worked in this place, for all the orgies he’s witnessed and taken part in creating – _this_ is the hottest thing his tired eyes have ever laid upon.

He squeezes his eyes shut, head dropping back on the sheets, mind and body overwhelmed and bursting. _This cannot be really happening to him_ , the thought rushes though his head, sobering him up. _He cannot be getting this after everything he’s done, he doesn’t deserve_ anything _about this –_

“Lee, sweetheart,” Maeve says, taking her mouth off his cock with an obscene pop. “This would be about the first time I’d have to ask a man to pay attention, while my mouth is in him. Does _wonders_ to my confidence, just so you know.”

“I, I…” god, is he fucking _pathetic_. Exactly the reason why this shouldn’t be fucking happening in the first place.

A horrifying idea burns in his mind and he’s almost too scared to put it into words.

“What you’re doing now,” he manages to say steadily enough, “have you ever stopped to think _why_ you’re doing it?”

Maeve’s expression falls as she stares at him, all humour gone from her face. He counts one, two, ten, twenty fucking beats of his heart before she replies.

“If you’re implying that this is my fucking _hooker_ _programming_ acting up right now --” she starts dangerously, and Lee hurries to cut her off before this spirals way beyond his control. Not that he’s ever in control these days.

“No, no, no,” Lee hurries to say. The earth is quaking around them, but maybe it’s just his exhausted body giving up. He coughs, tries again, “It’s just not – we’re, well, _you_ , you wouldn’t normally…” he breaks out, desperate for a way to make his words come across as something not degrading or obnoxious. Maeve raises an eyebrow, daring him to finish. “This just doesn’t, well, this doesn’t seem _real._ ”

He is momentarily thrown back to their first encounter at the control room, pretty much the same words coming out of his mouth back then, and he winces as he realizes it was probably the worst choice of wording he could’ve possibly come up with right now. He throws his head back at the dusty sheets, waits in uncomfortable silence for Maeve to say something, anything at all, but the silence rings on.

He dares to open his eyes, forces himself to look back at her. For anything he’s expected, it wasn’t for her to be looking at him the way she is now, a sad, almost desperate expression in her eyes, her mouth curled slightly downwards.

“You must believe me when I tell you, Lee, that everything I did, starting from getting off the train that was supposed to get me away from all this madness, I did _on my fucking own_.”

She pauses, while Lee nods wildly, trying to show her he absolutely agrees with her.

“Nothing in my life has ever been real, can you just fucking imagine it?” she continues, and he takes a moment to indeed imagine that. He finds that he can’t. “My parents who brought me up, my childhood friends, every single memory I had wasn’t real. Every single relationship in my life, every decision I’d made up to that point _wasn’t real._ Now you are a, albeit simple, yet fortunate enough creature who can’t have anything programmed into him, and who also – sorry, darling – isn’t just smart enough to alter my programming at this point, especially without me knowing; who is, compared to most of the host, is not physically attractive enough –“

“Am I blushing yet?” Lee interrupts, his cock definitely losing interest now. This is how she’s going to repay him for that little remark, and isn’t he a bloody idiot.

“And yet,” Maeve goes on, louder, “despite that, I felt the more powerful and in control of my life with you than I have ever felt, more comfortable than ever, more alive, more real. The world felt like it was losing its colour and brightness and _sense_ , when I thought you were dead. I have been losing bits and pieces of myself for a long time, darling, but the moment I knew you were dead it felt like this piece I lost would be the last of me.”

Distantly, he realizes he’s never wrote any of these lines for her. He swallows past the cotton ball in his throat, his chest rising and falling sporadically, and the entire thing is so overwhelming he wants to scream and cry and laugh and stop Maeve from talking and make her continue, because she’s right, he felt the same way and his world ended, too, and he needs this, he’s never needed anything more in his life.

“I shouldn’t be feeling this way – it’s illogical and it’s _irrational_ , but you tell me, sweetheart – doesn’t that sound just so fucking _real_?”

She puts her hand back on his cock, stroking it, her thumb spreading the wetness at the head. All energy drained from him, he whimpers so loudly he would have been embarrassed any other time, but just doesn’t give a fuck now. There’s a desperate warmness in his belly that turns hot, then turns into a burning fire inside him, and he’s going to come very soon –

“I’m gonna – it’s gonna be over, love, if you keep doing that,” he warns her. He feels like tosser for not even having touched her pretty much, and yet look at the state of him already.

“We’ll just get you started again then,” she smirks.

“I’m sorry to disappoint, but I’m not sixteen anymore, love,” he says, the endearment slipping out without his notice but feeling the most natural thing in the world to him. Her smirk turns into a smile so soft and so warm, as tough he is the best thing to ever happen to her. It’s almost too much for him, his cock burning up, his entire body on fire, droplets of sweat gathering on his chest, on his temples, on his forehead.

“Ah, I’ve forgotten about your people’s fragile stamina, I’m afraid,” she says, leaning forward and dragging her lips over his nipple. He gasps, his uncoordinated hands flying up to touch her anywhere she would let him, and he feels like an awkward inexperienced teenager.

And then she rises above him, her fingers wrapped around his rock hard cock, lines it up and slowly sinks on him all the way down.

The feeling of the tight hotness around him is overwhelming, and he cries out brokenly. Maeve bends down and kisses him, passionate and hot, tongue pushy and demanding, as if feeding on Lee’s neediness and desire and desperation. He bumps up into her, unable to hold still, and Maeve moans – a lingering gasping sound of pleasure, so Lee does it again and again and again, until Maeve is just as breathy and wanton as he is, her chest glistering with sweat. He sits up, scooping her up on his lap, and kisses her breasts, sucks onto her nipples, licks his way up her collarbones, her neck. She moves on top of him, a controlled pace of up and down, her hands ghosting over his back, scratching him ever so slightly.

“Please,” he hears himself say, doesn’t even know what he’s begging for, doesn’t even care. “Please, please”

Maeve arches against him, head thrown back in pleasure, and the burning in his body intensifies tenfold, almost painful to hold it for any longer –

She kisses him again, teeth clashing with his, gasping, and then her mouth is next to his ear and she breathes out: _I love you, darling_

Lee has broken an arm once, when he was eight, by having an unlucky fall from the swing. He remembers it perfectly, though, that feeling of childish glee when he is being thrown back and forth, higher and higher from the ground, until he reaches the moment when it’s the highest he can get. The swing chain creaks, and the world around him stops completely, life going still, sounds drowned out by the wind and the sound of his own galloping heartbeat. That moment –the highest he’ll ever get – he lets go and pushes forward, and, just for a few seconds that feel like a lifetime, he flies up into the sky, sun blocking his sight, and he _flies_ and he is _free_ and nothing else in the world has ever felt so good, not candy, not toys, not even finishing a new story, and as he flies up to the skies for those milliseconds before he hits the ground, nothing in the world matters.

He experiences that moment again now, feels it all the way in his heart – the absolute freedom, flying far from the ground, far from all the hurt, and he lets go of his pain and his grief and despair and his crushing loneliness. The world has stopped, and there is nothing left but Maeve, pressed everywhere to him, around him, within him.

He realizes he has blacked out, when he is suddenly lying back on his back, Maeve stretched out on top of him, body hot and soft and so, so dear. They lie still and silent, their breathing gradually slowing down, and Lee is hesitant to break the silence, the maze of emotion still untangled in his head.

“Are you not even going to acknowledge what I said?” Maeve says into his shoulder. The hotness of her breath sends vibrations down his body. “Way to go to make a woman feel needy.”

He sighs, takes a deep breath.

“I am so fucking in love with you that _I died for you_ , love, so please don’t be daft even question that again.”

Maeve unglues her head from his shoulder, looks at him with longing and tenderness and so many more things, Lee could never see through all of them.

“I’d rather say, your obnoxious old-Lee persona died once and for all, I would rather hope,” she smiles, nuzzling at his collarbone.

“Yeah, well, good fucking riddance, I never liked that bloke anyway,” he says drily. Maeve puts her chin on his chest, looks him in the eye somberly.

“Well I happen to quite like the bloke I am currently with,” she whispers, the reflection of the lamplight flickering in her eyes. “I only wish he would someday learn to like himself as I much as I do.”

He swallows past the lump in his throat, tightens his arms around her. Whatever she might say, there is no chance he will ever live up to her expectations, to the standards of a person she so wants to think he is.

The only think he can do is to try his best to someday, just maybe, become someone even remotely worthy of her love.

“Tell you what – when we get out of here – and do note I said _when_ , not _if_ , I’m being positive for all of us here – I’m taking you to a fucking Kinks concert.”

She huffs out a laugh, something in her expression loosening up, relaxing.

“Is that your way of asking me out on a date, Mr. Sizemore?” she asks, all mock surprise. “I wouldn’t have thought it possible for you to sound so firm and dominant…”

“It _is_ possible, love,” he cuts her off, kisses her gently on the forehead. “It’s a new world we are stepping into, here. Anything’s possible.”

\----

the end.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it, no more lengthy chapters, I promise!  
> Hope you've enjoyed.


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